Main fundraiser photo

Help our film come to life!

Your generous support got this project up and running! Join us in our next step towards making the film: The Moon in Deep Winter. You’re all invited to the world premiere!

Here’s a brand-new “teaser trailer” to give you a feel for the project:


Thanks to your generosity, directors Stefano Da Frè, Laura Pellegrini and an amazing crew shot several scenes of The Moon in Deep Winter during a full day of filming. You can see photos below of the entire crew hard at work, along with actors Russ Camarda, Carson Coughlin and Katya Martín. Instead of just one short scene, we were able to shoot enough to make our proof-of-concept a stand-alone short film!


Now, we need to have the material we shot professionally edited into a complete short film and then submit it to festivals to attract big-money investors.

For these costs, our goal is to raise an additional $3000. We hope you'll contribute whatever you can to make this happen. Thank you again!


UPDATE: Directors Stefano and Laura's 2017 short film, Tu Me Manques, won First Place (live action) at the Silk Road International Film Festival in Dublin in March. Their latest short documentary, The Girl Who Cannot Speak, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2018 in two categories and was named a Coup de Foudre (of which only five out of 1,815 films are awarded).

















See the rest of the behind-the-scenes photos here:
Behind the Scenes - full gallery


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First round of funding:


 ‌Who we are:
 

•Carson Coughlin (screenwriter, actor)


•Stefano da Frè (director)


•Laura Pellegrini (director)


•Lee Polevoi (author)


What we're doing:

We are shooting a proof-of-concept (a short scene for future investors) for our film, The Moon in Deep Winter, based on the breakout novel by Lee Polevoi.

We've already secured almost half of the funds required for this, but we need your help to raise the rest.

The pitch:

The Moon in Deep Winter

After a violent foray into third-world cash smuggling, Parker Sloane seeks respite and relief by coming back to his childhood home in the woods of New England. There he finds his blended stepfamily is just as twitchy, desperate, paranoid and unpredictable as the underworld types from whom he barely escaped with his life.

Before he can even unpack, Parker goes head-to-head with his relatives—his tyrannical stepfather, seething younger brother, newly evangelical mother, and his alluring younger step-sister Rita—and with the demons they never exorcised.

Maybe you can go home again, but you probably shouldn’t.

Directed by Stefano da Frè and Laura Pellegrini

Screenplay by Carson Coughlin, based on the novel by Lee Polevoi

“...the story is irresistible … Polevoi is a master of scene setting … the author keeps his narrative threads straight and sculpts his characters with exquisite precision, never allowing their intrinsic strangeness to become distractingly grotesque.”
—ForeWord Magazine

The story so far:

Several years ago, just having arrived in NYC from LA, I discovered a novel. I heard an excerpt read by the author at KGB Bar's prestigious “Sunday Night Fiction” series and it grabbed me: it was at once incredibly tense, funny and sad. I was so excited by what I’d heard I bought the book and took it home with me. When I read the entire novel, it jumped off the page and I knew it was destined to be a film.

Some time went by, but The Moon in Deep Winter stayed with me. When I finally contacted the author, he agreed to collaborate. We agreed to look for a screenwriter to expedite the process.

Meanwhile, I met a young director named Stefano da Frè, who took a liking to my work after seeing me perform a monologue at SAG-AFTRA. When we met for lunch, I tossed out the idea for the film. Stefano loved it. I told him of my struggle to find the right screenwriter for the project and in that moment I realized it was I who had this film in my mind's eye. Under a deadline from Stefano, I sat down and wrote the screenplay for the first act, a short film, in about 12 hours.

Your role:

We have a fresh story, a script, two up-and-coming directors, a production team and a crew at the ready. Now we need a certain sum of money to shoot the proof-of-concept so we can secure funding for the larger endeavor. The story is set in the dead of winter, so we need to shoot soon to catch the season.

This is where you come in: via a private investor, we've already secured almost half of the money required. We need at least $1,500 more to make our vision a reality.

Be among our first investors and help us get this amazing story out of the imaginal realm and onto the screen.

Any donation is appreciated — none is too large or too small.

We are grateful for your attention.

We are grateful for your support.

With love,

(Gregory) Carson Coughlin

Stefano da Frè

Laura Pellegrini

and

Lee Polevoi




  Rosso Films International

Stefano and Laura’s first film, Tu Me Manques, won 3rd Place in the Creative Mind category at the Cannes Film Festival (2017); 1st Prize, Best Film, at the International Film Festival of Scotland, Glasgow (2017); the Jury Prize, Silver Award, at the Chelsea Film Festival (2017); and is an Official Selection at the Silk Road International Film Festival in Dublin, an Oscar qualifier, in the International Shorts category (2018) [update: it won 1st Place].

 The Moon in Deep Winter (the novel)

Lee Polevoi is a graduate of Amherst College and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He has received a Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship, as well as a $20,000 screenwriting fellowship, co-sponsored by Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures (one of 10 writers chosen from a field of more than 3,000 applicants). In addition to an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Freya of the Seven Isles" for director Frasier Heston, his screenplay, "Hunter's Moon,” was a finalist in the Walt Disney/Touchstone screenwriting competition. He has just completed a new novel, The Confessions of  Gabriel Ash.
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Donations 

  • Marcia Polevoi
    • $200 
    • 6 yrs
Donate

Organizer

Carson Coughlin
Organizer
Brooklyn, NY

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