Stories for Social Impact with Tony Gapastione

Welcome to On Production brought to you by Wrapbook. Today I'm excited to have Tony Gapastione with us, the founder of brave maker, which is a non profit film arts organization dedicated to mentoring, supporting and elevating brave voices through film. Tony's work focuses on fostering community dialog around critical issues of justice, diversity and inclusion. He's here to share how storytelling and community engagement converge in his projects, including his feature film, Last Chance Charlene. Tony, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for being here. Thanks. Cameron, excited to talk. I love doing this kind of stuff. That's awesome. Yeah. So I know that some of my colleagues were able to meet you via Sundance Institute, which is awesome. What was your connection to the institute? And what's that been like in your life? Well, I just go to Sundance every year. Have been for 13 years. Any way I can get my creative tentacles into anything at Sundance is a win for me. And you know, I've been workshopping and hanging out in Main Street. We do a couple Airbnbs every year and bring people from the bay to Sundance to get them inspired. And I always attribute the reason why I started Bravemaker was because of Sundance. That's awesome. Well, I was just gonna ask, you know, what is Bravemaker and what inspired you to start it, and how does it align with your personal values and vision? I've been acting forever. You know, that typical since I was a kid, kind of thing in theater, and then progressed into the commercials and industrials and started doing film and that kind of thing, moved out here into the bay from Illinois, and I felt like it took me a while to realize you have to start making your own stuff, you know? And I just, I don't know if you're familiar with the filmmaker, Finn Taylor, but he is a Bay Area Oakland-based filmmaker. His new film, Avenue of the Giants, comes out in January of 2025 but he cast me in this small little role in a movie called Dartwin Awards in 2004

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and it was opposite Winona Ryder had a small role, but you film, you know, for a minute scene, you're all day, right, all the different camera angles we're filming out in Alameda. And I got to talk with Winona as an equal. It was so cool. Joseph fines was in that movie too. And I just remember sitting there going, wow. Like, this is awesome. I want to do this. You know, at that point, I was just the quote, unquote actor. And then it took me a while to really get the guts to do it, to think that I was able to make stuff and just go beyond, you know, hoping and praying someone would cast me in their projects. And, you know, cut to I had some personal tragedy in my life. A family member of mine died by suicide, and it really, really wrecked me, and I sought some healing and comfort by going to Sundance for the first time. This was in 2013 so you know, from 2004 to 2013 it was a wild ride. I remember going to Sundance just really being inspired and feeling filled and kind of grieving my way through all of the workshops and film screenings, and I just started to meet filmmakers, asking questions, and, you know, shaking hands, and having people tell me their stories, like, Oh, I was a actor too at one point, or I just took a shot on myself, or I still don't know what I'm doing, and I have a feature film here at Sundance. So I got the guts to start making my own stuff, doing shorts, which led to learning a lot of behind the scenes, things I didn't really know about before. You know, I'm a cisgender, white guy that goes to the world with a lot of ignorance. And as I was doing my work, I would start to hear, obviously, it's hard for anybody in the business, but then you start to hear the things that make it even harder, if you're a woman, or if you're in the LGBTQ plus community, if you're a person of color, all of these things really started to get my heart, and I felt humbled, really, by the things I didn't know that maybe even I was problematic to in my ignorance. So I started trying to make movies and stories that would stir conversations, you know, make us think deeply and Bravemaker started because of that, because I was like, Well, I want to create something that's going to coalesce these kind of conversations, these kind of people, and hopefully stir some funding to be able to do it. So we're a nonprofit that's really dedicated to creating community through education and entertainment, and we really care about stories that help us be better humans. Super awesome. I wanted to ask you about the community impact of Bravemaker. I mean, you, I was checking out the site. You know, it looks like you have monthly film screenings, and you're doing a lot of this work in Redwood City. How has the.

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Local community, like, really responded to this? What sort of things have you really been learning and taking away and seeing the impact of sort of organizing the community around the arts and film? In particular, I have a bunch of stories. I'll try to keep them short. You know, I have some real personal stories, like one. There's this woman I used to rent some space in a building in San Carlos, right next to Redwood City, and she was a single mom, single woman who was working in the adjacent company, and we would just chat along the way. I would tell her about Bravemaker. I would invite her to all of our film events, and she would never come. And then finally, after a year, I was telling her this event was about a true story of a kid who came out and had to wrestle with the abusive response from his dad, and for some reason, something like impacted her in that moment. She's like, Oh, she's like, okay, maybe, maybe I will come. And I thought, Oh, that's interesting. You know, she's never come to any of the things before, but this story got her and then cut to at the end of the night. You know, she's in tears after, and I'll call out the filmmakers. Name is Nick Jara, and he's doing some great stuff. He did this short film called Guardian, and she's like, Oh my gosh, this changed my life. I was like, Why? Why? She's like, I am like, that dad in the movie, I have pushed my son away because he's gay and I need to reconcile with him. And that was six, five-ish years ago. And now my friend, and her name is Jennifer, is a really active part of our brave maker community. She's always supporting, always like, what can I do? I'll cook food for your your Halloween fundraiser party. I'll volunteer at the film festival. And now her son has been coming to our events, and he's a guy in his 20s, and he's now engaged to his partner to get married, and it's really beautiful. And she attributes a film screening and a dialog to changing her relationship with her son, like that's the kind of stuff that we know film can do.

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At a larger level, our city has been impacted because we in Redwood City. We're a suburb of San Francisco. We are making space for these amazing filmmakers to come, and community partnerships are huge for us. So like just a month ago, we screened a film called No Right Way, written and directed by Chelsea Bo and it's a true story about it's a narrative, so, you know, fiction, but it's based on a true story of a girl who is in foster care and gets adopted by her half sister, foster adopted. And so when we screen these movies, we try to also invite community partners. So we had three foster organizations tabling at this event. And in the same way, right? We show a movie, we talk to the creator, and then we have these foster care organizations start talking about how they're impacting the community, the kind of work they're doing in schools for teens who are in foster care. And it's just this beautiful coalescence of community and art and creativity and practicality and non profit, you know, volunteerism, you know, inciting things happening, which make me just so, so happy. So at the end of the day, people are like, wow, this is so great. We need more of this. And like, yeah, we do. So So fund it. Funding is always a problem, but the impact is always really high, which I it's really cool. I started my career in the nonprofit sector as well, and we got our message out through films, and it was highly impactful. You could see the impact of stories on people's lives in the immediate and how that would sort of run through their lives after being affected by a powerful and good story. So really, really cool. I also experienced a ton of challenges doing this, though, you know, in my career in the nonprofit side, I'm curious what have been the biggest challenges you faced in running and building Bravemaker. And how have you overcome them? That's a big sigh, because it's, it's still, it's a lot of work. It really is. I mean, it's my passion, and it fuels me, but I'm tired. I work a lot, you know? It's like a startup. You know? I am a the soul of an executive director, but I'm also the janitor here at Bravemaker, I am the fundraiser. You know, we have a lot of great people who we have part time people and quarter time people who work and edit our podcast or do our communications, but it's still a lot of things that I don't have the resources to do. You know, we do a film program in Oakland at the East Oakland Youth Development Center, and they give us a grant so I could hire teachers to teach these middle school students film. We're doing a film program in Rockland, California, at Jessup university with their theater students. I am everywhere, and it's not very healthy, you know, to be able to do that, but I'm trying to sustain a life, you know, in a family with three teen daughters and sending one to college soon in the Bay Area. So there's a lot of anxiety. You know, my mental health is definitely I feel like always on the threshold of collapsing. So that's one thing I'm not sure I'm I'm super successful at. We started a an acting school a couple years ago, really out of necessity, because after pandemic.

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Uh, you know, we were like, how are we going to survive here? We got to find other ways to make revenue, like our T shirt sales just started doing it Cameron, we make $3 off every t shirt we sell. And we're only selling about 20 5t shirts a year. It's not a lot. So we had to get creative. And so at this point, I'm like, I don't know how we're going to keep sustaining this, unless we get some large, large grants, grants have dried up and dwindled. A lot of our corporate sponsors have cut back and, you know, being totally transparent, the political impact upon Bravemaker about nonprofits in general that are focused on diversity, equity, inclusion is threatened because there's a lot of people that are scared to attach themselves to a film festival that might be elevating things that could be politically divisive, even when it's about protecting women's rights or elevating racial justice as people are afraid. So we lost some sponsorship, I think because, again, layoffs, people are budget cutting, charitable donations, we're doing a lot with less in that. I don't know. I don't know what we'll see. I keep telling my team, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I go, we just have to cut back. We'll have to do, you know, our film festival will continue, but just might be, we have less to offer or less venues, because inflation in these rental prices have to be met with, you know, ticket sales and sponsorships, otherwise, it's not a good business choice for us. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you were just mentioning that, you know, some sort of broad changing themes, or the world just changing and orienting around different narratives, new narratives. But you've also seen in your work, like, a big impact and how audience resonate. I mean, can you discuss a specific film or event that you feel like really particularly, particularly resonated with audiences, and why you still feel so passionate about this work and these types of stories our opening night this year, 2024 was the film Daughters, which was just released in on Netflix couple months ago, and it premiered at Sundance. I connected with it there. One of our sponsors, the TDB Foundation, Family Foundation, rented the space for us and flew out the filmmakers. It was so amazing. In the film is about four specific families that are walking through the incarcerations of their fathers and the impact upon their girls from age five to age 17, there was not a dry eye in that theater. The film is masterful. It's getting a ton of buzz right now, just for a New York Critics of Choice Award, people are saying it's probably going to be nominated for a Best Documentary award. That film inspired conversations about incarceration, about how we need to look at it differently. The filmmakers even themselves. I just thought they were going to be with us for opening night. Angela Patton, co director and Lisa Mazzo the producer, ended up staying with us all four days during the festival, coming to our workshops, and then, well, one of them was so inspired, because we do grants every year for emerging filmmakers. We have a pitch contest to give some seed money away. One of them said, how could I make a grant? Can I donate some money to add to the pitch fest grants that you do? Because I'm so inspired by this community, and that's what I live to do. Like, yeah, like her movie. Their movie inspired us to talk, to engage and inspired filmmakers to get creative, to go out and tell these important stories. But it also inspired the community and our audiences to, you know, meet the makers and go, Wow, I want what can I do? Well, you can volunteer. You can you can support families that have incarcerated loved ones, especially at the holiday time. It just was awesome. Cameron, like that kind of stuff. It's priceless. It's priceless. You know, Tony, I'm really curious, you know, pivoting a little bit from Bravemaker, which is doing all this programming, bringing all these people together, helping to distribute and tell these really inspiring and interesting and engaging stories. For you, I mean, you described a little bit earlier that, like you've been an actor, you've been on set of different on different types of scales for you as an actual film producer, what is it that you're really interested in? Tell me about the movie that you were making. Give us a picture and sort of like how you went about getting your movies produced. I'm really curious. Just, you know, our audience are really producers. I think they astounded and super into what you're building a Bravemaker, but just your journey as a producer. What's that been like? I'm a filmmaker at heart, so when I do my Bravemaker work in our film festival stuff, I'm always thinking about, what kind of experience can I create for a filmmaker? You know, I've been to so many festivals with my short film. So I have, you can look up all my short films, but I did this film with Loretta Devine called 1440 and counting that had to do with the impact of gangs in communities and upon schools and teachers who end up mentoring and caring for kids when they kind of get lost in the shuffle. And I got to go to all these cool festivals. And I remember being in New York at an amazing film festival, like, oh, they rolled out the red carpet literally, literally, you know, we had a Getty photographer. It was a.

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Awesome. Then I went to this other film fest where I showed up with Loretta Devine, who was my star of my short film, and they had no red carpet. They had no photographer. It was like, What? What is going on? I was embarrassed, and I just thought, okay, there's such a dichotomy, you know? So I created Bravemaker, because I wanted to make sure that filmmakers felt valuable. But my my experience has been I just love being on set. I love I'm an actor, right? So I started as an actor. I love that creative process, and I know how freaking hard it is. I know how much, how many insecurities are flaring. So when I'm producing or directing a project, I really care about the cast and the crew to make sure that they don't ever feel demeaned or devalued. I want them even when it's so freaking stressful, I want them like, I want to look in their eyes. Go, we're living our dreams. Remember that? I just say that a lot like, remember this is so hard, or we just had to, we had to reshoot the scene that we just spent three hours doing, because we're the wrong road, you know, wrong wardrobe, dang it. But it's okay. It's gonna make for a great story when we're when we're finished, you know. So I really try to keep that morale up. People often say, you know, the culture of a set is, you know, it comes from the directors, comes from the producers, or the number one on the call sheet, the actor. And I really care about that stuff. There's no HR in filmmaking, so I value that, you know, inside, no, I'm a pastor, so I've been this, like ordained. I have a master's in theology, you know, which doesn't go very far anymore, but it really instructs and guides how I treat people. I really live, I hope my life in a way that's let's loving, loving and kind. And I want people to know the stories we tell are so, so important. But if I am using people or abusing, manipulating or deceiving them in any way to get that done, then it's a loss. So that's really important. My first feature film came out two years ago, labor of love called Last Chance Charlene and I did it like on a wing and a prayer like I raised $80,000 not a ton. We did it all through our nonprofit, and it's a story that, as I mentioned earlier, is based on a true event of losing a loved one to suicide. And I wanted to tell a story that normalized grief, that also poked at how we're not comfortable with it. So Charlene is a actor turned screenwriter. So you know, there's, there's my personal touch to it, who's navigating the loss of her brother when he dies, and how it affects her creativity. It affects her marriage, it affects her parenting. It just affects everything. And so that was what story I could tell, and I loved doing it. Allison Ewing was my lead actor, and I found her here in the Bay Area. So I love doing things in the Bay Area, but a couple people up from LA as well to be a part of it, got to pay everybody you know, day rate, which felt good. And the film won an audience award at Cinequest, which is a San Jose based Film Festival. We got some distribution, and I'm still riding that high. Still really great trying to get my next feature off the ground, which looks like one of them, because I got a few. Might be happening in spring of 2025, we'll see. But it's still hard, man, it's still like getting that funding. I get discouraged a ton because it's just there's not a lot out there. But I'm hoping I can just throw some of that caution to the wind and make something, even if it's like less.

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My first short film, I made for a ridiculous amount of money. I made it for 40 freaking thousand dollars my first short film, then I made a feature for 80,000 which is mind boggling. So I think in some way I'm expecting my next feature. Like, am I gonna make a feature for 20,000 I don't know, like, or five, I don't know where, I just got to make a feature film and not let the money hinder me. It's super inspiring. There's so many awesome stories of people that figure out ways to build, like, really healthy, happy, inspiring sets and tell some really great stories along the way. That's really awesome. Tony, I'm really curious. Can you give us a sneak peek in any kind of upcoming projects for yourself. I mean, you're just talking about a potential new film for you, how people can watch your films, how they can connect with Bravemaker. Something we used to say when I worked in the nonprofit industry was that we need people's time. We need their talent, and we need their money. As people learn about brave maker, the festival, your programs just sort of give a sneak peek in what's coming up next and how people can get connected. Yeah, definitely go to bravemaker.com and follow us there. We're on all the socials to bravemakerorg, and we're, you know, continually putting out things, especially if you're in the Bay Area. But if you're not in the Bay Area, plan on coming to our festival July 10 through the 13th. 2025

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really proud of what we do there, in the type of workshops we provide and the mentoring and you know, I'll just shout out. Ken Winningham is a TV director. Has been in the industry for 30 years. His most recent was an episode of Abbott Elementary. But he's been on Parks and Rec. He's been on the Bernie Mac show. He's.

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Been on the office. He's been on Blackish. He's just an icon in television. He just got his first feature film that he's going to be doing with Lowell Ray, Howard and Randall Park, and I'm helping to get that, hopefully in production in the Bay Area with Bay Area rebates, with the make it Bay film collective, which is really, really exciting. So I'm not officially a producer on that one yet. I hope I can help make that happen. But for my own work, I wrote a film called 33 days. I will be producing it. It's based on the true story of a guy named Roger Huang in the Tenderloin of San Francisco who came from Taiwan in the 80s to work in the hotel industry and ended up really falling in love with the children of the and wanting to see human trafficking put an end the drug war, especially how it impacted kids, be put to end by creating a school, a church, a clinic and a rescue mission. So we took his true story and turned it into a feature film called 33 days, because he did a hunger strike when Newsom was the mayor in 2004 so we're telling that story of his 33 days of saying, I'm not going to eat anything until you all bring more attention and safety to the. So that's 33 days. And then I've got another feature called the thorns we live with, although I've been trying to push a change in the title, because the thorns we live with is about a family that is also dealing with their dysfunction around Thanksgiving, when they reluctantly reunite together. But I keep wanting to change it to family pricks and people either love that or like no that no one's gonna want to buy that. I'm like, no, come on, family prick sounds so much better than the thorns we live with. But that's a feature that I wrote that I would also like to direct as well, and hopefully that'll be in production at the end of 2025 we'll see, well, Tony, super, super awesome, what you've been doing. It's really amazing how you've been able to pull together, really a community, build an ecosystem that is both giving and sharing and working together to get stories made for independent filmmakers. Super awesome, and I hope to run into you at Sundance one of these years. Come on. I'll be there. I'll be there. Yeah, if anybody's listening to this before, we have like, one or two shared rooms available. If anyone's interested, hit me up. Tony at bravemaker.com but we'll be there the first half in 2025 awesome. Tony, thanks for joining me on production. Thanks, Cameron.