In The News

MFA invites you to brave the winter chill, assemble your film team, and rise to the challenge for a chance to win cash prizes!

The 2022 MFA Winter Film Challenge is the Maine Film Association’s first-ever weekend-long filmmaking celebration, providing a platform for Maine filmmakers to challenge themselves creatively and showcase their skills and talent. Teams of filmmakers from across the state will have 72 hours to write, shoot, and edit a short film. All events associated with the competition will accommodate in-person (as COVID allows) and virtual attendees through a hybrid format. We hope this will enable interested creatives from Fort Kent to Kittery to participate and make a film in their hometowns.

Niels Juul hopes to raise up to $10m and says he wants to ‘democratise’ antiquated funding system.

The executive producer behind blockbusters including Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is to make Hollywood’s first feature film funded entirely by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with a promise that those who invest will get a share of any profits and meet the stars of the production.

Niels Juul, who has set up the production company NFT Studios to fund a series of films, hopes to raise between $8m and $10m (£6m and £7.5m) through the sale of 10,000 NFTs to the public and institutional investors.

Juul said the aim was to develop a new funding model for films to circumvent an antiquated Hollywood system under which smaller productions take up to eight years to reach movie or TV screens.

“Producers have come through the first three COVID waves and know what to do to keep things moving,” one veteran producer notes, pointing to safety protocols implemented at the start of the pandemic that, for the most part, have allowed studios and independents to keep making movies even through this fall’s surge of infections caused by the Delta variant.

“Rapid testing is widely available, so production facilities can test everyone every day, making transmission pretty unlikely. I really don’t see a big impact over the near term,” notes Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter. “But if it turns out that Omicron is more deadly than thought and we are more defenseless, it will become a problem.”

Heather Hemmens says her off-the-grid childhood helped her get the roles she has now, in Hallmark Channel’s ‘Christmas in My Heart’ and on the CW Network series ‘Roswell, New Mexico.

Lots of people can recite lines from their favorite holiday special or movie that they watched on TV every year growing up. That’s not the case for Maine-born actress Heather Hemmens, even though she’s now starring in one.

Hemmens, the lead actress in Hallmark Channel’s “Christmas in My Heart,” grew up in the woods of Waldo, a small town near Belfast, in a house that was off the grid. So her family had no electricity and no television, meaning there were no Christmas movie repeats. But Hemmens feels the discipline and focus she learned from her childhood in Maine have contributed to her success as an actress. So, in a way, her lack of TV helped her get on TV.

Disney says it will spend $8B more on content in 2022 than 2021, mostly on shows and movies for its streaming platforms.

The Walt Disney Co. is planning to turbocharge its content spending in its fiscal 2022 calendar year, which began Oct. 1.

According to the company’s annual report, which was filed with the SEC Wednesday afternoon, Disney plans to spend approximately $33 billion on content over the next year, inclusive of its streaming programming, linear programming and sports content.

That is an $8 billion increase from fiscal 2021, when the company says it spent approximately $25 billion on content.