A couple of days ago I received notification that my first documentary, Dear Chelsey, has been nominated for Best Documentary at Detroit’s Uptown Film Festival. The festival takes place March 8 – 10, 2012 in downtown Birmingham, MI.
When I started the production process of the film, my focus was and remained throughout to simply tell the story that I had in front of me: How a young girls’ cancer fight was a spark, no – an explosion of inspiration that led to the creation of a foundation to help kids like her and changed one man so much he chose to run 482 miles in 13 days across the state of Texas. On the backside, I figured we’d produce and sell some DVDs to benefit Snowdrop Foundation and submit Dear Chelsey to some festivals. I knew very little about the film festival circuit – in fact as of this writing I have never even been to a film festival. Uptown will be my first.
Dear Chelsey is in good company as it shares nominations with two other films in the same category at Uptown. And both of these are films created by experienced directors and filmmakers. In Your Hands is a documentary by Jane Pittman, Annette Brieger and Heather Burns. They have extensive libraries of work in documentaries, educational, social interest and other genres with PBS appearances and national distribution. On The Bridge, is the work of French director Olivier Morel – he’s a writer and has contributed to a series of documentaries about World War I, his interviews with Holocaust survivors appear in a video installation for the Mémorial de la Shoah and the city of Paris. Oh yeah, he also teaches as a lecturer at Notre Dame.
I’m just a radio guy who found myself in the right place and was given the opportunity to do something I always wanted to do, make a film. It’s something I want to do again.
So, I say all of this not in an attempt to sound humble – I think that to do anything that lives in a performance or entertainment space requires that a person (me) have at least a little ego – but because I recognize that I am already in a place where I probably do not belong. Some might say I haven’t “paid my dues” in the filmmaking world, but I am grateful to be here.
More important to me is having eyes on the film. I want you and as many others as possible to see Dear Chelsey…and YES, I want you to BUY IT on DVD. This is not about me making money, I don’t get a cent. But the money you spend does directly affect families and their kids who are in a bad place in life. Every penny of the purchase price supports pediatric cancer research at Texas Children’s Cancer Center in Houston, TX and it also provides tuition assistance through Snowdrop Foundation for college-bound pediatric cancer patients and survivors.
Equally important is to continue tell your friends, share the links, and send your friends to DearChelsey.com.
Thanks…see you in Detroit on March 8th.