Brown Finch Films is a filmmaking collaborative based in Chicago, Illinois that produces transformative documentary films that inspire, evoke, and enliven. The cinema is both an art and an history, and as filmmakers, they respect their calling to make films that are both artistic and insightful. Their films probe deep into their subjects to ask questions that are controversial, historical, rhetorical, and inspirational.

We came to the Etsy blog because our documentary, Proceed and Be Bold! is about a self-employed artist, and we thought that other Etsians would love to see a film about someone who makes a living with their art. Also, we love Etsy and shop here often!

Brown Finch Films is kind of like a craft club for people who like making films instead of scarves… Our first documentary feature film, called Proceed and Be Bold! is the biography of an inspiring artist, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.  He quit his corporate job at the age of 40 to follow his dream of becoming a letterpress artist, or as he calls himself, “a humble negro printer.”  Laura Zinger, the director and co-founder of Brown Finch Films, was initially intrigued by Amos’s racially and socially provocative posters.  She took a dinky little video camera to one of his gallery shows a couple years ago, then looked at the footage and saw the possibility for a feature documentary film.

Amos’s inspiring story really took root in Laura. His journey is about finding true joy in creating the things you yearn to create and saying the things you really want to say. Laura teamed up with cinematographer and Brown Finch Films co-founder Michelle Kaffko and editor Stacey Simcik, dragging them across the country (and even to Italy) filming amazing artists and crafters who know Amos.

We were filming in some amazing art and craft spaces, including Hatch Show Print, a letterpress company in Nashville that has been printing event posters since 1879.  Current head Jim Sherraden gave us a tour of the floor-to-ceiling shelves that house block prints for the presses, and showed us how the shelves themselves are made out of discarded block prints nailed to the frames.

While filming at the design and silkscreen printshop, Standard Deluxe in Waverly, AL (population, 265), we met a proprietor who built a beautiful wall in his studio out of salvaged windows and doors, perfectly meshed together Tetris-style.  And who can forget the amazing Alberto Casiraghi in the small town of Osnago, Italy, where he fed us a delicious meal, and then showed us the rooms of his home, which were filled with letterpress art books.  He collaborates with other writers, painters and poets, and prints short run editions of art books, refusing to sell them for any more than about $15 each so the everyday person can afford them.  We filmed Alberto in his garden and had to repeatedly shoo away his goat, who kept trying to eat the microphone cable…

After meeting all these inspired creators (and their goats), who wouldn’t turn to their own machines of creation and start making stuff?  The finches at Brown Finch Films (or BFF as we like to call ourselves) came back to our Chicago home and started sifting through all of the footage to put the story of Amos’s life together.  We ended up with a documentary film we are incredibly proud of: Proceed and Be Bold!

While taking the film to screenings and panel discussions in theatres, groups, and schools across the country, we also started making our own crafts to raise funds for the production of DVD copies, complete with special features and Italian subtitles for overseas viewers.  The crafts started when Michelle made some cute little handmade felt plush finches for the film premiere, to give to everyone who helped out during production of the film as a thank-you gift.  The finches were a hit, and people started asking for them at other screenings.  So Michelle made a handful more to sell at screenings, and she called them “fundraising finches” so people knew that purchasing a felt finch went directly to the filmmaking collaborative.  Soon she was making mini felt finches as pins for the filmmakers and their collaborators to wear at screenings.  Then, naturally, she started making felt pins with swear words on them, and they were selling like hotcakes.

I guess what everyone at Brown Finch Films learned through this experience is what Amos was telling us all along: “Don’t be an artist.  Artists are full of themselves.  Just make stuff.  Just quit your job or whatever you hate doing, and make stuff, damnit.”  And that’s what the finches are doing now.  Laura quit her 9-to-5 job, swapped it for a part time teaching gig and moving back in with her father to lower her cost of living, all to be able to truly follow her dream and make a documentary film.  Now we’re all hooked.  We’ve got three more feature documentary films currently in the works, and still booking screenings for Proceed and Be Bold!

Find our more about the film and screenings near you at BrownFinchFilms.com.

Further resources:
Kennedy Prints
Hatch Show Print
Standard Deluxe
The Bird Machine
Typeface Documentary
Columbia College Book Arts Program
Kangaroo Press