Film-makers want to change the world, writes Ashley Campbell
KEY POINTS:
Qiujing Wong and Dean Easterbrook were not surprised by recent news that more than half of New Zealand professionals don't like their jobs.
It's not that the founders of screen production company Borderless Productions are among those dissatisfied employees - it's that they know a lot of people who are.
"I have so many friends we have dinner parties with and they can't wait for Friday and they dread Monday," says Wong. As Easterbrook says: "Everybody's talking about what they're up to in the weekend but we'd rather be talking about what we're doing during the week."
If ever two people were living their dream, these are the two. Wong and Easterbrook genuinely believe their company will change the world. Indeed, they have had some success already, with their documentary A Grandmother's Tribe.
The film about the plight of hundreds of thousands of African grandmothers struggling to raise grandchildren orphaned by HIV/Aids has raised $80,000 since it was first shown late last year.
It is, says Wong, a film that makes people want to act, as this story from the Canadian premiere shows.
"After the film had been seen, a man in the audience raised his hand, and asked what it would cost to build a house for one of these grannies," says one of the company's press releases.
"The answer was $3000. The man said he wanted to write a cheque. Another person raised their hand, and said they would like to build a house too. Within minutes, 10 houses had been pledged."
And that's just the beginning. The DVD is about to be released and the next "for-purpose" film project - an examination of why young people turn to drugs and what those drugs do to them - is already in progress.
These two social entrepreneurs have come up with a model for being creative, doing good and also earning a decent living. They simply don't buy into the model of struggling artists living off benefactors and the smell of an oily rag. Wong, after all, has a commerce degree.
"One of my personal pet peeves about film-making in general is that there seems to be a psychology around it that it just should be funded by the Government," says Wong. "It's almost like a welfare system for creative people - they have their hand out and they get funded.
"Business doesn't operate like that. Business says that if you have a product that I want to buy from you, then I will buy that product for what the fair market value is in my perception, and I'll pay for it and you'll sell it to me and we're trading something.
"And I thought, well, why shouldn't film be traded in the same way? I don't want to be a charity case for anybody and, if people are giving me money then I should be giving them something, either tangible in money or tangible in social good, which is just as valuable to some people as getting their money back."
Their model is the result of several years of searching for what they wanted to do and then trying to make it work. Wong completed a degree in commerce, but switched to a postgraduate diploma in journalism because "the commerce seemed so superficially about money and I needed to be doing something about people".
But this daughter of a Chinese entrepreneur and English lawyer also wasn't satisfied with where journalism would take her, saying she learned little more than "how to write a story". A couple of years in a corporate marketing job - where she learned that business is really all about how you sell yourself - followed by a couple of years of freelance contracts followed.
Then Wong realised she really wanted to do television. "I thought it's probably the most powerful expression of a story. Or maybe at the time I was thinking it would be the most fun - I was young. I didn't really have this whole humanitarian drive at the time, it wasn't like I wanted to save the world, I just wanted to be known for telling great stories."
So she got a job in a television production house, where she met Easterbrook, a trained broadcaster. Romance blossomed but something more besides.
"What I was thinking was what Qiujing was telling me - that we were working for a company that didn't have a big picture view of the world, it had a small focus," says Easterbrook. "So we decided to travel to Canada to explore a nation."
They settled in Vancouver, a city with a thriving film industry and a well-developed social conscience. There, they noticed an interesting difference between New Zealanders and Canadians. If New Zealanders have what they think is a good idea, they keep it to themselves, afraid someone else will steal it. Canadians, on the other hand, talk to other people about it. As a result they are encouraged to continue and are frequently put in contact with people who can help.
Wong and Easterbrook had work - publicist for the Motion Picture Industry Association and contracting director and editor - that helped them to meet people who encouraged their dream of creating a screen production company to make films that mattered. Borderless Productions was born.
By day, they earned money and networked. In the evenings and weekends, they took on projects that earned no money but set them on the road they wanted to travel.
They made a film for the World Kindness Movement. They made a film for the Salvation Army. And then they were approached by a former journalist who had been in Nepal, filming another journalist who told the stories the Government would rather remained untold.
"All he had was a bunch of footage and a vision but no real ability to tell the story," says Wong. "So he came to us and we worked with him. Again, it was pretty much labour of love, but we eventually sold it to PBS [Public Broadcasting Service]."
The film was also shown at several festivals and it got them thinking.
Easterbrook says: "It made us think about the bigger side of a film, of positioning it in a campaign where you get a bunch of people excited by an idea, finance a film and then the profits or some of the profits can go towards the issue that's being talked about."
Further projects gave them experience in raising finance and, when they returned to New Zealand, they set about turning Borderless Productions into their dream.
The company has two strands. One strand - making corporate videos - ensures there's something to live on and invest back into the business. The other aims to change the world, one film at a time.
But, taking a cue from the company name, the division between the two is not stark. They ensure their corporate clients are like-minded organisations that support their philosophy.
One corporate client, asked if it thought the two strands should have different names, said: "`No, not at all. Because what attracts me to you guys is the fact that you did that film [A Grandmother's Tribe], that you make the long-form documentaries'."
And although Borderless Productions took no money from that project, its model for future for-purpose projects does involve making a reasonable return.
"We've decided we can do the same intentioned for-purpose films that are fully financed," says Wong. "And we're going to do that through an investor model.
"Basically there's a film about an issue and a campaign that supports what you're trying to talk about. It no longer is about a film, it's about a bunch of people and interested parties supporting this issue. The more powerful you are at attracting the community to the campaign, the more chance you have of them watching the film. And the more chance you have of them watching the film, the more dollars they'll spend on either buying it as a broadcaster or purchasing a DVD as an individual.
"And there's always this aspect of the not-for-profit or the give-back, or whatever you want to call it. And that's another rule of our structure: there must be a give-back aspect."
The DVD of A Grandmother's Tribe includes a booklet of action points and educational material, with all donations to be sent to Vancouver-based, Africa-focused charity the Stephen Lewis Foundation. A percentage from the sale of the DVDs will also go to the foundation. But not all.
"We take whatever's remaining as far as revenues from the DVDs and we reinvest it into the next project," says Wong. "And that's what we're going to build as a sustainable business model, not a philanthropic model. And that's the difference. In order to grow and to succeed we have to sell it." There's a balance here - a knowledge that to feed the passion that drives them, they have to earn a living. But there's no doubt which is more important.
"How much money do you need? Even if we were making $100 million, I still don't know that I would spend more than, I don't know, $80,000 a year. I'm not really interested in dripping with jewellery or anything like that.
"But the fun part of making $100 million is what you can do with that." You might even change the world.
