May I Dance With You? - Financing a short film

Story

During a midnight escapade, a restless young man enters the shadow realm, in search of a weary young woman’s affection.

Origins

May I Dance With You? is a story I've wanted to tell for 2 years now, first inspired by an excerpt of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. In the course of those 2 years I've been lucky enough to meet and learn from some wonderfully talented filmmakers, writers, and producers, and so today, with your help, it feels like a real possibility that we could fund a 5-day shoot, and bring the story to the big screen :) 

Please feel free to browse some of the story's themes and characters noted below.

Teo

Concept

The film is a classic ‘boy meets girl’ romance tale, told from a contemporary science fiction angle - in the tradition of Burning, and La Jetée. A restless man, and a weary woman, initially strangers, must navigate an impromptu midnight escapade, in order to forge a connection. Through the course of their adventure, they grow braver, they bring out the best in each other, and they fall in love.

The film asks a key ontological question, What if our identities were to span across more than one spatial dimension?

Audience:

15 - 35 year olds, a number from African and Caribbean diaspora.

Theme:

The film is largely about connection: the quest to know one's self and to know one another, a quest for truth. The theme can be expressed as: 

“Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“Given two points, there is but one straight line that joins them.”

Characters:

Kofi - Kofi is an excitable young man, enraptured by the newfound freedom that early adulthood is giving him (Stephen Dedalus, Jesse Wallace), he is newly free of his adolescent insecurity, but in order to truly express his identity, and connect with others, he needs to learn to commit.

Ola - Ola is weary of the world around her. Aware that she sees things differently from most people, she has become familiar with solitude and therefore quite comfortable in her own identity (Van, Céline). She must revive the curiosity she once had for the world. She wants to meet her equal. She wants to love and be loved earnestly.

The Team

Perks

With a £25 donation, you can choose to have your name in the credits of the final movie.

Challenges

This crowdfund will also help to ensure that cast and crew are fairly compensated for their work, and that our crew can access the equipment necessary for the execution of film's visuals, as seen in the short promotional tease.

One particularly tricky element of the production will be organising the logistics of the outdoor night shoots, and protecting the gear from the elements.

In order to meet these challenges, we are aiming to raise as much money as possible to put towards the production. Without these funds we risk producing an inferior or incomplete story, which would in turn compromise our main ambition to screen the film at film festivals around the world.

FAQs

When will production commence? - 24/11/2024