Hello – we are trying to raise $10,000 using the indiegogo platform in under 30 days. The money will be used to hire an editor for one more month to get the film to rough cut status.

We’ve had a great response from our community so far. Please have a look here

Hello – Dan is on Radio 4 Midweek with Libby Purves this week – tune in at 9am on Weds!

Click below to listen to the show (it’s now gone off Iplayer!)

Dan_Edelstyn_BBCR4_Midweek_28_07_10

We’re in the middle of shooting all the models made by Hilary that bring the story of Maroussia Zorokovich to life and provide the backdrops to the drama scenes filmed in our action packed shoot in March. Ross Birkbeck is working closely and inspirationally with Dan and its very exciting seeing it all come together as Ross will also be working on compositing all these scenes over the coming month. Thanks to Tom and Ian who are camera assisting and being a great help in the heat of our hackney studio. Here are some pictures of it all in process……(more on our flickr site)

The ‘How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire’ series has now launched on Babelgum. The first three episodes are now live at www.babelgum.com/vodkaempire and there will be a new installment of Dan’s journey every week.

The cardboard empire is still growing as we complete all the models required to composite with the film’s recent drama shoot and bring Dan’s Grandmother Maroussia’s vivid manuscript to animated life. Here’s a glimpse of Belfast docks where Grandpa Max and Maroussia arrived after a long journey across Europe in exile throughout the 1920s. We’ll be arriving there very soon too to film Dan’s own journey into the more recent past and the motivations that prompted this whole Odyssey.

The green screen backgrounds of our recent drama shoot will soon be disappearing and making way for a cardboard world – the studio’s filling with planes, trains and armoured automobiles and a ballroom rises out of the rubble of an imagined city and the real junk of modern life. If anyone has a collection of old wallpapers, carpet backing, brown paint/varnish, old brushes, broken chandelier bits, red carpet scraps do get in touch.

Exciting news for the film in progress – we are just in the process of launching our channel on Babelgum – you’ll be able to catch up on our progress with relaunching the empire as a social enterprise vodka, by tuning in here!

http://www.babelgum.com/vodkaempire

We’ll be releasing new short clips every week or two from the launch.

Thanks to all the participants – musicians, poets, performers, artists and film makers who made Optimistic Immigrants at the Jewish Museum London (Sunday 28th March) such a great night. Thanks to Gina Borham for looking/being fantastic as ever and providing some amazing props and music in the form of a gramaphone playing beautiful 78inch records. Thanks too to Eriko for running our bar and of course Shiri Shalmy and all at the Jewish Museum and Polska! Year for inviting and supporting us. Photos of the event are now up on the myvodkaempire flickr site.

Come along this Sunday for music, film, poetry, performance and vodka!
We’re running another ‘Optimistic Immigrants’ night – this time as part of the launch of the Jewish Museum London. It’s a great space, the event’s recommended in Timeout this week and we’ll be running a bar.

Here’s what’s going on:
Optimistic Immigrants at Jewish Museum London
This Sunday 28th March 7.30-10pm
Raymond Burton house, 129-131 Albert Street, Camden Town, NW1 7NB
Box office: 020 7284 7384 / admin@jewishmuseum.org.uk
Tickets £10 including one drink and the chance to win exclusive Vodka Club membership.
Part of Polska! Year

In partnership with JCORE Jewish Council for Racial Equality
Part of Jewish Open Culture

LIVE PERFORMANCE
The Paper Cinema & Kieron Maguire
Like watching a film being created before your eyes. Created by Nic Rawling, The Paper Cinema make live animation using lovingly-crafted paper puppets who inhabit surreal paper worlds. Live music by Kieron Maguire on viola and flamenco guitar. The Paper Cinema will be performing 2 pieces on the themes of travel, migration and separation.

Dunajska Kapelye
” Extreme, virtuoso Balkan Gypsy Jazz ..” Timeout
Polish violin virtuoso Piotr Jordan leads this powerful ensemble through traditional Gypsy, Eastern European and Klezmer tunes shot through with searing jazz improvisation. Dunajska Kapelye have been playing together since 2006 and win hearts wherever they play. Their playing is deep and emotive and whilst perfectly able to dazzle with speed and virtuosity they prefer their playing to speak straight to the soul. “Piotr Jordan…plays the sweetest gypsy violin in London” Jack Massarik, London Evening Standard. Yugoslav Viktor Obsust brings many years of playing and teaching in Eastern Europe and Uk to his robust and classically-tinged double bass technique. He has taught jazz improvisation and Gypsy style playing and his performance – particularly with the bow – is affecting and atmospheric. Jez Cook is well known on the jazz circuit as a hotclub specialist renowned for his sensitive Django-style playing.
Photo credit: Tony Campbell

Klezmer Bun
Featuring Monooka (vocals), Dave Shulman (clarinet) and Zac Gvirtman on accordion, Klezmer Bun (pronounced “boohn”) plays a range of Romanian folk songs, including some Yiddish and Romany repertoire.

Visuals by Gillian McIver
WEST TO EAST, JOURNEYS THROUGH POLAND
Photographs taken during a number of journeys to Poland 1996 – 2009

Jude Rosen
Poet Jude Rosen will read from her pamphlet ‘A Small Gateway’ (Hearing Eye, 2009) written from the perspective of a second generation immigrant from the Jewish East End. Part lyrical, part surreal, part poetry of witness – the poems cover the experience of displacement and cultural shifts, the loss of Yiddish and relationship to the new Germany, artists in post-genocide Sarajevo and a Palestinian journey. She will also be reading the Uncle Hymie sonnets – tragi-comic stories of East End eccentricity and mashuggeas. All the poems deal with survival – the costs and unexpected cultural outcomes of migration and intergenerational change.

FILM
A programme of films will be screening in the museum auditorium with a Q&A session with directors led by Dan Edelstyn of Optimistic Productions who will also be introducing the story of the vodka empire which remains the impetus behind the Optimistic Immigrants events.

How to Re-Establish A Vodka Empire . Dan Edelstyn. 8 min trailer
Since finding his Grandmother Maroussia Zorokovich’s vivid account of life in and escape from Russia during the 1917 Revolution Dan has been obsessed by her riches to rags story of romance and exile. 2007 saw Optimistic Productions working on green screen sequences bringing the account to life in dramatic form within the development of the drama documentary ‘From Bolshevism to Belfast’. In February 2008, using her lively and colourful manuscript as a guide Dan went on a quest to the Ukraine. He discovered that within what some had dismissed as romantic fiction were the clues that led him not only to her estate but to the factory that her father had established in 1904 ‚ a spirits factory that was expropriated during the revolution but which is still open for business almost 100 years later. With this twist in the story comes a new film as Dan embarks on importing the spirit of his ancestors into the UK and, following in their entrepreneurial footsteps, launching his own Vodka Empire with Zorokovich 1917. The film is a co-production between Optimistic Productions and Dartmouth Films and will be screened as part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’ strand in 2011.

Émigré. Robyn Woolston. 10.22mins
An intimate and personal meditation on the lives of immigrants; some illegal, some religious and some that are now mere ghosts. Émigré is based on the true story of her great grandparents, Jews from Lemburg, Poland (now Levov, Ukraine) and Vilna (now Vilnius – Belarus), who emigrated to Birmingham from Eastern Europe in 1881. Their descendants went on to establish a well-known business in the city’s Jewellery Quarter ­ Harman Brothers – which is still there today. Robyn brings the story up to date by comparing her ancestor’s experiences with immigrants arriving in the Midlands today.

The Blue Balloon. Jean Bojko. 10mins
A portrait of the director’s mother, Ksenia Axmann/Charabara was 19 year old when compelled by historical circumstances to leave her native Ukraine and settle in the small rural village of Corbigny in central France. She was 83 and when the film was shot she still sung the soundtrack song “Tata nema” heard in train of refugees during the 2nd world war.

Calling Home . Marcelo Starobinas and Maria Eduarda Andrade. 10.11mins
For most Londoners, home is here but also somewhere at the other end of a phone line. Calling Home is a gripping portrait of long distance relationships.

The Referee. Mike Paterson.10 mins
Against the backdrop of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, ‘The Referee’ tells the story of Nikolai, a Ukrainian Sunday League football referee on London’s Hackney Marshes. ‘The Referee’ is a film about isolation, community and fair play.

East End Lives. Hazuan Hashim and Phil Maxwell. 10 mins
Examining the East End of London through the eyes of tenants and residents of East End Homes.

INSTALLATION

A Few Things I Know. Estelle Rosenfeld
In a very simple and ‘childlike style’ animation, puppeteer and artist Estelle Rosenfeld deals with her interpretation of family memories and stories. She reinterprets her father’s account of how her family immigrated from Poland to Paris at the beginning of the 20thcentury and were send back there in 1942 to die in Auschwitz. You will be able to peep into five ‘train carriages’ animation movies telling Estelle’s family story across Europe. ‘A Few Things I Know’ is part of Estelle’s recent work, a mixed media project called ‘Puppets & Dolls’, inspired by a family snapshot taken in 1930 on Berck-Plage, across the channel.

A Recall to Catherine the Great. Regina Fichter
An interactive ‘Living Portrait’ of the Russian tsar Catherine the Great and the German Russians. The whole installation is about finding a home and a (cultural) identity. In the middle of all this sits a Queen: Please feel free to have an audience with a special Queen! Regina Fichtner was born and grew up in Mainz/Germany. She originated from a German Russian family, which came back from Russia to Germany in the 1970’s. Today she lives in London. She is an independent performance artist and a Theatre teacher and part of the female movement artist collective “The Ophelia Collective”.
Concept & Performance: Regina Fichtner
Make up Artist & Stage Design: Sabrina Andresen
Artistic Advisor: Antje Hildebrandt

Thanks to everyone involved – all film makers, performers and musicians, Shiri Shalmy at the Jewish Museum for inviting us and working with us on the event, all staff at the Jewish Museum, Polska! Year for supporting the event and Gina Boreham.