In this 3-hour, 2-part consultation with Peabody award-winning filmmaker, Judith Helfand you can get frank, concrete, and mighty useful feedback on your development materials (framing, character and story resonance, and its translation into a "deck", one-sheets, anchor image and anchor language as in tagline, logline synopsis. You can come in with all that material but in dire need of a new title, branding, tagline - even a new name for your company -- and if that is the case, you can use your sessions for brainstorming. Titles are her favorite - and a good one is invaluable!
If you are applying to, or better yet, got into a market and need to prepare, you can use your time for some intensive, fun, story-first pitch training. Whether it's for table meetings, big forum style (Hot Docs/IDFA), or the more intimate round-table sessions [where the panelists literally sit around a small table with filmmaker/producer in front of an audience -- Helfand can help you make your "pitch" sing. Bid now, apply to a range of markets, and use part 1 of this session to help you apply, and then once you get in (fingers crossed) use part 2 to help you prep for the pitch.
Judith Helfand is known as much for her quirky sense of humor and irony, first-person storytelling chops, and the non-fiction genre she calls "toxic comedy" -- as she is for her field building, story-focused pitching training, and passion for language, coming up with film titles (Blue Vinyl, Love & Stuff, Absolutely No Spitting) and naming organizations, companies, and even pitch forums (Chicken & Egg Pictures, "Secret Sauce Media" and the Jewish Film Institutes' new pitching forum, Pitch & Kvell ).
As a filmmaker, she has taken on and tackled some of the most pressing issues of our time harnessing the power of transparency and storytelling styles that lend themselves to what she calls "Serious Fun" -- starting with A Healthy Baby Girl (Sundance 1997), Blue Vinyl (Sundance 2002), Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (DOC NYC 2018/Independent Lense 2020) and more recently Love & Stuff (HOT DOCS 2020/POV-PBS 2022) Helfand’s other long-form films include Everything's Cool and The Uprising of '34.
Helfand is a field-builder who has helped reshape the documentary landscape by co-founding two critical organizations, Working Films, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. As Creative Director she helped design and lead Chicken & Egg Pictures’ mentorship and funding programs for nearly a decade, served as a Producer on the Oscar-nominated, Dupont-winning short, The Barber of Birmingham, and Executive Producer on the award-winning films Semper FI: Always Faithful and Private Violence. She continues to work at Chicken & Egg Pictures as a Senior Creative Consultant. In 2007, Helfand received a United States Artist Fellowship. In 2016 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch. In late 2018 she completed and launched Cooked: Survival By Zip Code, a feature documentary for which she was awarded the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s 2019 Freedom of Expression Award. The film was nationally broadcast on Independent Lense in February 2020, a prescient moment in time just before the start of the Covid Pandemic. The film was so useful in fact, offering a framework for understanding the connection between systemic racism, and commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago Heat Disaster, the dramatic center of the film. Helfand's goal: use the press attention that comes with the anniversary of an official disaster, and the 2020s and curate a series of virtual Summer of Extremes events to reframe how this devastating moment of climate change history was remembered and reframed as to why the 739 Chicagoans died in one week -- it was structural racism, not the heat. Helfand's newest feature Love & Stuff, inspired by the 2014 NYT Op-Doc of the same name, had its world premiere at Hot Docs 2020, kicking off two years of virtual screenings with Judith doing the Q&A from her kitchen table surrounded by the "stuff" she couldn't part with and wanted her daughter Theo to grow up with. The film had its national broadcast on POV this past September and is poised to launch a targeted community engagement campaign Spring/Summer and Fall of 2023.
Helfand recently completed a two-year visiting professorship at the Columbia Journalism School where she taught the art and craft of documentary to visual journalists. She has taught at SVA's SOC-DOCS program where she remains an adjunct professor as well as at the Visual Journalism Program at the Newmarket School of Journalism at CUNY.
Over the last five-plus years she has had the honor of leading pitch training and serving as moderator for Chicken & Egg Pictures' live pitch at the Sheffield Doc Festival/Market. This experience -- which she LOVES - led to her joining the team at the Athena Film Festival to help develop, evolve, and produce their annual Doc Work-in-Progress Pitching Forum [which just took place on Friday, March 2, 2023, and more recently forums for the Jewish Film Institute. "Pitch & Kvell", the Double Exposure Film Festival, and the Vantage Live Pitch at the DC Environmental Film Festival (this March 26, 2023). She is deep into engagement with three of her films COOKED, LOVE & STUFF, and more recently a short that is launching this May in a five-borough NYC world premiere tour called Together, Not Alone, timed for the third anniversary of the Covid lockdown. She lives in NYC with her eight-year-old daughter Theodora and their bunny Coco Knigl.