"Dear Zachary" to premiere at Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT)
Kurt Kuenne before on this subject, so I'm happy to do it again and
happier still that this project of his has come so far. Please
consider attending and/or donating.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Hello everyone,
Kurt here; Happy December to you! I hope the holidays have started
off wonderfully for you.
I have some wonderful news to share: "Dear Zachary: a letter to a
son about his father" - my documentary about the lives and murders of
my dear friends Dr. Andrew David Bagby (1973-2001) & his son Zachary
(2002-2003), and the heroic struggle of Kate & David Bagby to change
the system that facilitated Zachary's murder - has been selected to
premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, held
January 17-25, 2008.
For those of you on this email list (and there are plenty) who are
not in the film business and may not be familiar with Slamdance,
suffice to say this is a pretty big deal. Slamdance is held
concurrently with the Sundance Film Festival right on the same street
in Park City; it was founded 14 years ago by a group of upstart
filmmakers as an alternate venue for the best films that didn't quite
get into Sundance, and has over the last decade become a world-class
event of its own, part of the same media frenzy as Sundance, just as
hard to get into, and often paving the way for terrific distribution
deals for its films which have, in some cases, eclipsed the
distribution achieved by films from Sundance. They received over
1200 feature film entries this year and are screening just 29 films,
only 14 of which are documentaries -- and "Dear Zachary" is one of
the 14. The festival programmers told me that they were absolutely
honored to be premiering the film, and we're likewise thrilled and
honored to have the slot. The film shows at Slamdance Saturday,
January 19th at 6 PM and Thursday, January 24th at 3:30 PM. Ticket
details haven't been posted just yet, but will be soon on the
Slamdance website:
"Dear Zachary" has also already been invited to screen in the
Documentary Competition at Cinequest, the San Jose Film Festival, the
following month, running February 27-March 9, 2008. Cinequest, now
in its 19th year, was named one of the top 10 film festivals in the
world by the Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. It's an event my
films have been fortunate to have been a part of consistently over
the last decade, and I'm thrilled that the film will be seen there.
This will also be a wonderful place for the enormous number of
friends and "extended family" Kate, David & Andrew have in the San
Jose Bay Area to see the movie for the first time. I'm honored and
thrilled that they are including the film, and I hope to see a lot of
you out there; Cinequest doesn't post their line-up on their website
until late January/early February -- and hasn't even decided on a lot
of it yet, but they contacted me early to say they really wanted this
movie. So I won't have dates and showtimes for you for a little
while, but will be in touch when they're available. (Check their
website, www.cinequest.org, for info as it becomes available.)
While this is very exciting, these are just first steps; I hope the
attention that the film gets by premiering at these venues (and the
numerous other festivals I'm sure the film will play over the next
year) helps ease the process of getting this film out there to the
general public at large more quickly. But as I've been saying for
the past several years, no matter what happens, I'm going to make
every effort to get this movie seen far and wide, particularly in
Canada, where I believe we will ultimately be successful in reforming
the bail laws that allowed an accused probable pre-meditated murderer
to take our little Zachary from us. I've been tremendously pleased
with the response to this film at test screenings this year; post
film discussions with the audience often lasted 2 tearful hours, with
strangers breaking into tears and saying that they now felt like they
knew Kate, David & Andrew and had lived through the experience. The
movie is having the effect I hoped for, and I think that in
conjunction with David Bagby's best-selling book about this tragedy,
"Dance with the Devil", it's going to have quite a bit of positive
social impact in the coming years. I'll keep you updated as things
progress.
I want to thank all of you so much once again for your tremendous
support of this movie during the past year - whether financially,
verbally, through providing services, interviews, photographs, old
videos, working on the movie in some capacity, writing about it or
just through hugs and kind words - if you're on this email list, you
have, in some way, helped to make this possible. This film was
funded entirely by donations and good will, and all proceeds from the
film's distribution will be going toward the Dr. Andrew Bagby
Scholarship in Family Medicine at Latrobe Area Hospital in
Pennsylvania and the Dr. Andrew Bagby & son Zachary Bursary at
Memorial University of Newfoundland. We're still trying to raise
another $10,000 or so to help with the costs of promoting the film
(preparing exhibition copies for festivals, festival entry fees,
DVDs, promotional printings & mailings, a publicist, errors &
omissions insurance, etc.), so if any of you are looking for an end
of the year tax deduction :) - or perhaps thought about donating last
year but never got around to it - you can still donate at
www.dearzachary.com for the next little while. (Contributions to the
film are tax deductible! :)
Thank you again to everyone for helping make this possible; this is
your movie, and I look forward to sharing it with you. I'll be able
to get DVDs out to you all in the early part of next year, after the
initial festival premieres, but I do hope you get to share the
experience with an audience very soon.
All the best,
Kurt
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