Last year, Cape Town filmmaker Tim Greene published a call on his Web site for 1 000 companies that each had R1 000 available to donate to Twist, his local film production based on Dickens` classic novel Oliver Twist.
By May this year, 1 000 pledges had rolled in, and after having converted these into hard cash offerings, Greene was able to proceed with the production with purely local investors.
"For me there are two important reasons to keep the funding local," Greene says. "Firstly, if the money comes from overseas, the profits go overseas, which isn`t going to help us to grow a local movie culture. Secondly, if the money comes from overseas, the control goes overseas and the result is movies that are weak tourist pastiches rather than dynamic reflections of this country."
Cape Town commercials production house, Monkey Films, came on board to help produce the film on what was still a tight budget. The online investments totalled R950 000, the Spier Arts trust contributed to bringing the budget up to a more viable R1.25 million and more recently, a grant was received from the arts and culture trust.
"I am over the moon we got all the money that we asked for within a year," says Greene. "All that it took was to find a mechanism that people could cope with by spreading the risk."
Filming is taking place in Cape Town, and once the movie is completed, the funding companies will appear in the credits in what Greene says is to be the longest list of associate producers in history.
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