The true story of the woman who taught the western world to look inward.
A feature film by Nora Jacobson
A true story, mostly forgotten
1874. A farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont, where the dead are said to appear, night after night.
A skeptical New York journalist arrives to investigate. So does a Russian mystic with a mission of her own.
Neither of them leaves the same. What began in that farmhouse became a movement that reached around the world.
They were all reading the same woman.
Piet Mondrian
Joined the Theosophical Society in 1909 and remained a member for life. Asked where his ideas came from, he said he got everything from Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.
Wassily Kandinsky
Named her in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the book that announced abstract painting.
Hilma af Klint
Joined the Society in Stockholm in 1904. Her rediscovery filled the Guggenheim.
Helena Blavatsky
She has never been the subject of a feature film.
Built by hand, from the century it depicts
Cutout collage assembled from 19th century steel engravings and chromolithographs. Rotoscoped live action. Hand-painted backdrops. Live action that turns into animation and back again.
Made by people
A production designer building rooms that no longer exist. A costume designer dressing 1874. Painters making backdrops. An animator working frame by frame. Actors and a crew.
Our animator, Grier Dill, most recently worked on Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within a Time. Our production designer has worked on Nora’s films for years.
Your gift pays working artists.
Nora Jacobson
Guggenheim Fellow. National Endowment for the Arts. Films at Sundance and the New York Film Festival, broadcast on PBS, distributed by Icarus. Thirty years of independent filmmaking in Vermont.
Her last film recovered the story of the poet Ruth Stone, overlooked for most of her life. This one does the same for a woman whose influence is everywhere but whose name is a secret except among the lucky few.
Something you can actually see
Your gift pays for a budget, a schedule, and legal work. It also pays for a finished sequence of the film itself, live action turning into animation, made by the same team that will make the feature.
Every donor receives a private link when it is complete.
$60,000
What each level of the campaign completes
- $25,000produces the proof of concept
- $45,000adds rights, legal, budget and schedule
- $60,000completes development through casting
Every dollar goes to the work.
Most fiscally sponsored films lose seven or eight percent to administration. Ours loses none.
Our production designer, our animator and our painters are working below their rates. The filmmakers have already put $10,000 of their own money into this.
Gifts are fully tax deductible.
This is development funding. It makes the film financeable. Any gift beyond $60,000 goes into the production budget.
Every donor receives a thank you letter with our EIN for tax records, and is thanked by name in the end credits of the film.
For you and your advisors
Fiscal sponsor
Upper Valley Arts, PO Box 322, Norwich, VT 05055. A 501(c)(3) organization, EIN 03-0353910. Upper Valley Arts takes no administrative fee on gifts to this project.
Ways to give
- Check payable to Upper Valley Arts, memo line WOAW, mailed to PO Box 322, Norwich, VT 05055
- Donor advised fund grant to Upper Valley Arts, designated for Woman of Another World
- Gift of appreciated securities (contact Nora for transfer instructions)
- PayPal: donate here, or through PayPal Giving Fund if you don’t have a PayPal account
Not an investment
This is a charitable contribution to a fiscally sponsored project. It confers no ownership, equity, profit participation or creative control. The production intends to seek private equity investment separately, and no charitable gift can be conditioned on future participation.
Reporting
Donors receive a written progress report and a private link to the completed proof of concept sequence.
Use of funds
| Proof of concept: animation, live action shoot, post | $25,000 |
| Producing: budget and schedule | $6,000 |
| Development consulting | $6,000 |
| Casting and executive producer services | $8,500 |
| Legal | $5,000 |
| Rights and clearance | $2,000 |
| Archival image licensing | $1,000 |
| Key art and materials design | $2,000 |
| Fundraising costs and processing | $1,000 |
| Administration and contingency | $3,500 |
| Total | $60,000 |