The Art of Film Funding

THE CROWDFUNDING QUEEN™ is a multi-award-winning Hungarian-American film and theater director, producer, and storytelling innovator. She has garnered over 37 awards and accolades and was once an Oscar contender in the “Best Documentary” category for her acclaimed film Torn from the Flag Kovács is also known for her Cannes-award-winning short Brown Paper Bag and is recognized worldwide as a crowdfunding expert, often referred to as “The Crowdfunding Queen.” She engineered major fundraising campaigns — including raising substantial funds for Torn from the Flag — and now teaches filmmakers how to use crowdfunding and strategic donor engagement to power their projects forward. She splits her time between Hollywood and Hungary and works internationally in film, theater, and education.

Helen Hall is an award-winning producer, director, and composer whose work explores the intersection of art, science, and energy. With more than 30 years of experience, she creates films that combine original research with cinematic storytelling to explore complex and unusual subjects
She is currently completing the feature documentary Pictures of Infinity, based on more than two decades of research into Nikola Tesla’s long-hidden blueprint for a sustainable energy future. The film has received major honors, including the Roy W. Dean Award and the Carole Dorothy Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.

Christine La Monte, producer/director/writer and former film marketing executive at Universal, Disney, and Orion is the founder/president of La Monte Productions where current projects include VIVA VERDI! the feature documentary Shortlisted for Best Song, where she serves as producer, writer and executive producer. Also on the awards circuit, AI WEIWEI’S TURANDOT, a co-production with Italy’s Incipit Film and La Monte Productions

Scott Billups is an award-winning cinematographer and visual effects creator who has worked on over fifty motion pictures. As a world leader in the creation of virtual characters for movies and games, Scott went back to school in his forties to study AI as a way to breathe life into his inanimate creations. Armed with an entirely new tool set, Scott was Apple’s first evangelist to Hollywood, co-founder of the AFI Media Lab, CTO of the game industry’s leading supplier of AI (Rival Theory, which became a subsidiary of Google), founder of an AI healthcare company that created the first personified virtual clinician on the IBM Watson health platform, and developer of an AI-robotic eldercare pilot program for the National Institutes of Health. Billups currently resides in Port Hueneme, California.

Our special guest this week is the award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner. Timoner founded Interloper Films and is known for movies about visionaries challenging the status quo and personal documentaries that reveal the bittersweet side of facing seemingly impossible challenges. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy and chairs the Nonfiction Subcommittee for Special Projects at the DGA. Timoner is the only director to win Sundance's Grand Jury Prize twice—for DIG! and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Both films are in MoMA's permanent collection. Her numerous credits include her 2022 documentary LAST FLIGHT HOME, about her father's end-of-life journey. It was Oscar-shortlisted, Emmy-nominated, and earned her the Visionary Award for Observational Filmmaking as well as the Humanitas Prize. Today we’ll discuss her recent documentary, ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN, about the historic LA fires that took her home and town of Altadena. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.