Documentary filmmaker and Film Independent Fellow Marah Strauch (Documentary Lab 2011, Fast Track 2010) will be premiering her debut feature, Sunshine Superman, at the Toronto International Film Festival later today. We caught up with Strauch to ask her about her film, her experience in the Labs and how it feels to be taking her first feature to one of North America’s most high-profile film festivals.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be premiering there,” Strauch said. “I felt like it was the right place for the film.” Sunshine Superman examines the extreme sport of BASE jumping, which involves jumping off of unmoving platforms like cliffs, bridges and buildings. Strauch began to research and pursue her topic after finding BASE jumping footage shot by her uncle, and from there, the film evolved over eight years into what will be showing at Toronto. “I probably cut about 20 pitch reels,” Strauch estimated, “and I pitched it, really hard, to a lot of people. So I learned a lot about my story through pitching… it eventually just got kind of boiled or whittled down to the core elements.” The documentary primarily follows Carl Boenish, known as “the father of BASE jumping,” and his wife Jean. “Ultimately I trusted that a love story was something that really interested me,” Strauch said, “and as an end result, I think the film very much is that love story that I set out to make.”

Strauch and her team got creative when it came to funding the production. “The way we got it financed is really, really unusual,” she admitted. One major turning point was when she took part in Film Independent’s Fast Track financing market and launched a Kickstarter campaign around the same time. “We’re really lucky in that we have a built-in audience with BASE jumping being the topic,” she explained when asked about her crowdfunding strategy, “so we were really able to ask the core audience for our film for money. We found our first investor through Kickstarter, who put a significant amount of money into the project. It’s really good for finding people who can be passionate about your film and put in a larger investment.” Strauch and her team also put the film on the crowdfunding platform Slated, which she said was absolutely instrumental in financing the film.

Sunshine Superman also relied on foreign financing. “We’re a coproduction with Norway,” Strauch explained, “we met a really great guy, Sigmund Holm, who works for the Western Norwegian Film Commission, and he helped us put together a coproduction and we were able to set up production in Norway, so that was a giant thing for us.” Strauch said one of the most important things she learned making Sunshine Superman is that “first-time filmmakers don’t think of it as a business…and I think, especially if you’re an independent filmmaker, you really need to know about that. You really need to know about it on kind of a global scale, not just the United States.”

Her other main piece of advice for first-time filmmakers was to be open to receiving help. “I think a lot of times, first-time filmmakers will get very defensive in terms of showing their films,” she said, “but it’s a learning process… It’s important to allow other people who have been through the process to really help you and ask you questions.” She said her experience in the Film Independent Documentary Lab had a major impact on her film’s progress: “Having [my] peers look at what was kind of a rough cut was really helpful at just kind of figuring out what was at the core of our story. I felt very fortunate to be surrounded by really established documentary makers—I actually felt like I was one of the less established documentary filmmakers in the Lab, and it was actually really wonderful for me, because I got to learn a lot.”

Strauch cited the support of executive producers Josh and Dan Braun of Submarine Entertainment as being instrumental in getting the film to Toronto, and said that having Josh Braun as a sales agent was “one of the best decisions we made in this process.” Universal Pictures International Entertainment has already picked up the international rights to Sunshine Superman, and the film will screen at the New York Film Festival in October after its Toronto premiere. For Strauch, it’s a wonderful ending to an epic eight-year journey. “Having a documentary take this long and have this kind of success is a really good thing,” she said. “It’s very satisfying.”

Mary Sollosi / Film Independent Blogger