Establishing film collective Film Tonight!

Film Tonight! is a collective of four early career female filmmakers and artists bound by shared passion for cinema, feminist values & principles, common school history rooted in Academy of Moving People and Images and immigrant background. As active filmmakers we have identified common needs revolving around the following questions – in our precarious state, how can we have our works made preserving our autonomy and agency? How do we create a supportive infrastructure around us where learning is shared, intensified and everyone involved benefits from it? How can this shared environment contribute to facilitating more transparency and softer practices in the film industry? The “burning-out” pace inherent in the filmmaking field - do we have to subject ourselves to it if we are to achieve our goals? How can we mindfully choose our pace without being afraid for our careers taking a damage from “slowing down”? In aiming to find the answers to those questions, rather than trying to tackle the industry status quo as lone individuals, we believe in leaning towards and onto each other to consolidate our efforts and practices into a “guerilla - flexible - playful - daring - feminist - contemplative - hands on - things done in house” collective whose needs and ways of fulfilling them have no middlemen in between. The grant would be used to establish and fuel the collective's artistic activity and develop its sustainable operational model. The collective's work will encompass structured learning via workshops and practice/exercises, structured peer support for each individual's project, sharing the knowledge with other communities via event organizing, supporting each other in forming new collaborative relations. Our hope for the collective is to become an innovative center of gravity for resources and knowledge that will allow its members to move and develop within it, while developing the collective itself and finding new ways to be filmmakers.