Photo by Kevin Haas of the Rock River Current.
100 Paintings TO HELP TELL THE STORY OF A PAINTING
TL;DR : Buy a small painting to help turn a $75 painting found in Rockford into a serious documentary about memory, responsibility, and the strange places history resurfaces. Your purchase helps fund the development work needed to bring larger producers, funders, and partners to the table.
A painting bought for $75 out of the back of a pickup truck in Rockford MADE A MYTH BECOME REAL.
This painting may be the first known physical evidence of a Holocaust-era painting workshop of Jews forced by a Nazi officer into creating copies of European masterworks making him very rich.
That sounds impossible.
The people who made the discovery were not traditional historians.
Not an institution.
They were Tim Prince and Sarah Thistle, two Rockford people who make bone sculptures from roadkill and sell oddities most people turn their nose up at.
They could have sold the painting for a small fortune.
Yet, they returned it to Poland.
That choice is character defining.
This film asks what that choice says about Rockford, memory, responsibility, and the strange places history chooses to surface.
Help Rockford claim its place in a story with international historical weight.
I’m making 100 original 5" x 7" paintings for sale.
A painting for a painting
WHAT YOU GET
An original 5" x 7" painting.
A film credit.
A direct role in helping develop The Copyists documentary.
SALES GO TO FILM PRE-PRODUCTION AND development
The goal is not to keep asking this community to carry the whole film.
This fundraiser helps me film the conservation of the painting in Poland, continue the research, build the treatment, create the pitch materials, and bring the right larger partners as Executive Producers to the table.
In other words, this is the step that helps the project grow beyond a local fundraiser and into a serious documentary production.
Our City, Our Story
The painting surfaced here.
The choice to return it happened here.
The first people to protect it were from here.
For years, I have been telling stories through Our City, Our Story built on the belief that Rockford carries stories bigger than people expect.