Long Live The BUREAU
Some of you reading this have been following along long enough to know our backstory - many of you helped make The BUREAU a reality. Last October, thanks to a successful campaign, The BUREAU was fully funded for its inaugural year - ie, 12 short films, each directed by a different indie filmmaker.
In the months that followed, we have been busy organizing schedules, reaching out to film societies and festivals, planning the next steps for how to grow this collective into something sustainable. It's not as simple as following in the footsteps of other small, indie studios - The BUREAU is an anti-studio is the same way that a protagonist can be an antihero - we are indeed a collective, and we are, by most definitions, a studio, but we lack almost any and all conventional studio attributes:
1) We provide funding for the short films, but we do not own them - the films remain the property of the filmmakers, and we act as a representative of those films, advocating for more direct audience involvement and transparency.
2) We seek out talented and experienced filmmakers, and then encourage them to take risk. We don't approve scripts or concepts, nor do we sit in on or oversee any of the creative process.
3) We believe wholeheartedly that audiences are complex - which is an easy position to take when looking at the data that bares this idea via any number of Kickstarter campaigns. Our founding principles include a diverse pool of both filmmakers and film enthusists.
Yesterday was an important day for The BUREAU, the first short film premiered at 2 AM PST to a small but passionate audience of 500 people. Written and directed by Mylissa Fitzsimmons, the short film 'That Party That One Night' marks the start of something unique, something that The BUREAU is committed to growing into a movement, into a conversation around the importance and value of short films
