Thanks to our Producer, Neva Tassan, since 2016, we’ve been working with professor Jack Lerner and students of the University of California Irvine’sIntellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic.
Their wonderful team provides pro bono legal services for films like ours, some who otherwise could not afford the necessary legal expense. They have helped us with contracts, Fair Use claims and other invaluable nuanced guidance. They even connected us to two other fabulous lawyers, Marcia Hofmann & Kendra Albert of Zeitgeist Law PC, who helped us file our FOIA requests with the U.S. government in relation to Ghazwan’s past. Their work was phenomenal, meticulously thorough, returned results and was also provided pro bono. We can’t thank them enough!
This semester Kristina Martinez and Oluwatobi Agbelemose have joined our team from UCI’s IPAT. They have been vetting our due diligence research in trying to track down owners of footage used in the film that we have not been able to license yet. We are in the final stages of attempting to locate the owners. This process has taken over a year and the whole core FBTTB team has worked hard to get here. We have a few final leads to track down yet but if nothing is fruitful, we will be making a claim for Orphan Work status in order to begin distribution on the film. We are so grateful for their invaluable work, and could not have finished the film without them!
Who knew filmmaking was this complicated, right?! And this is just a small slice of the pie! It truly takes a village and none of this would have been possible without the support provided by many of you reading this blog post!