Fantasy A Gets a Mattress - Film Festival Fund

Safiye Senturk is organizing this fundraiser.

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Hello all!

For the past 4+ years, Dr. Clean Productions has been working on the feature-length narrative film FANTASY A GETS A MATTRESS. We have spent countless hours perfecting our film and getting it festival ready.

Since our world premiere in April at the Seattle Black Film Festival—where we were awarded BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE—we have received sweeping positive media attention, with glowing coverage by Brendan Kiley for The Seattle Times' Pacific NW Magazine (here and here), Robert Horton for Scarecrow Video (here), High Country News (here), The Stranger's Charles Mudede (here), The South Seattle Emerald's Jas Keimig (here), Chase Hutchinson for The Seattle Times (here), KUOW NPR Public Radio (here and here), and FOX 13 Seattle (here), and more!

After selling out the SIFF Film Center, we have been overjoyed by the positive reception of the film. We sold out 20 screenings at The Beacon and broke the theater’s record for consecutive sold-out screenings—we beat out Uncut Gems! In September we had a sold-out opening night screening at the NW Film Forum for Local Sightings Film Festival and added an encore screening. We were awarded BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE by the Local Sightings jury! That same month we sold out our entire run at Grand Illusion Cinema; we had a 50+ person line of people without tickets waiting over an hour in the hopes of still getting in. In October we were the opening night and BEST COMEDIC FEATURE in Ithaca, New York at the Silent City Film Festival. We also were the opening night film and BEST PNW NARRATIVE FEATURE at the Tacoma Film Festival, where they had to screen the film in two sold-out theaters simultaneously in order to accommodate the turn out! We wrapped up a week-long screening run at Central Cinema where we sold out three screenings with 125+ people; the theater had to bring in folding chairs to accommodate the crowd! We have recently screened in Brigton, ME; Lansing, MI; Baltimore, MD; Dallas, TX; Spokane, WA; Portland, OR; Brighton, ENGLAND; Sioux Falls, SD. We had a 400+ audience for a special screening at the SIFF Egyptian Cinema in Seattle. We also held a private screening for international rap legend SIR MIX-A-LOT, who called the movie “Funny A.F.”!

In recent news, we were programmed for a screening run at Spectacle in NEW YORK CITY and sold out five screenings! Our key creative influence, Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn, attended our NYC premiere and gave us his endorsement. He even arrived wearing a Fantasy A Gets a Mattress pin! The film has developed an incredible reputation, with audience members coming as many as six times to see the film. At our final Brooklyn screening we had a standby line of 20+ people ecstatically waiting in the pouring rain. We crammed them in well past the theater’s capacity. One woman insisted she would sit on the floor under the screen. Another person watched the film from a stool in the very obliging projectionist’s booth. The crowd’s positive response was immense. A total triumph!

Getting accepted into film festivals is an honor and a chance to meet other filmmakers, producers, and potential distributors. Attending festivals will create the opportunity to help the film reach a larger audience. We are extremely eager to screen our film in front of new audiences and share the power of FANTASY A!!

The reality is that submitting and traveling to film festivals is not cheap. Submission fees alone can range from $50 to $100. This GoFundMe campaign will make it possible for us to submit to and attend film festivals and land a distributor for the movie.

Funding:

Funds raised via GoFundMe will be used towards film festival submission fees, air travel, and accommodations.

Film Synopsis:

Fantasy A, the real-life autistic Seattle rapper, suffers trials and tribulations from total creeps as he attempts to become a superstar. After being kicked out of his group home onto the grim summer streets, Fantasy A sets off on an odyssey to achieve fame and find a good mattress to sleep on in this ensemble comedy filmed entirely on location in Seattle.

Trailer:

Click Here to View Trailer

Directors' Statement:

FANTASY A GETS A MATTRESS is a movie about people on the fringes trying to make art without industry support, during an unstable time when things change every second. Considering this theme, it was important to us that we involve underutilized local talent and locations. We wanted to show that there was more to Seattle than the Space Needle in the background of a couple shots. We wanted to take the best people we knew and the best locations we could find, and somehow sew them together like Frankenstein’s monster, in order to make a movie—before all the locations were torn down and before the actors had to cut their hair and get real jobs. We are glad we made the movie when we did because it is already a period piece of a Seattle that no longer exists.