Normal Festival 2007 seems to have just ended and we already have to occupy ourselves with fundraising for upcoming projects. In December we moved to the multicultural center for contemporary art Meet Factory and we intend to take maximum of our stay in this inspiring environment. With the participants of our filmmaking courses we started working on new films. The song Houby (Mushrooms), aka Muchomůrky bílé (White Amanitas) by Tony Ducháček and Garáž will have a new videoclip. We are working on it right now and since the song is about eight minutes long it is a big challenge for all of us. When we are done with mushrooms our next topic will be comics and multimedia. Nobody knows where this could lead yet but it will be huge and you are going to see it at Normal Festival 2008. We continue going to regions of the Czech Republic to make intensive filmmaking workshops in various organizations there. New original amateur films are being born here. And because we really love film, we started preparing a new documentary, which, in a way, might be a continuation of last year’s Relationships. When we need to have a rest and not think about film we think about theatre. In June we would like to organize a mini-festival called Normal Theatre. We want to invite (among others) two professional ensembles of actors and actresses with learning disabilities. To pay for travel costs, accomodation and honorarium fees of 25 people from Slovakia nad 18 people from Poland is very financially challenging so we keep applying for various grants and hope to raise sufficient funds for this event. Our studio inMeet Factory is large enough to enable us to organize various „in-house“ events so we are also planning on film screenings for our friends with and without obvious disabilities. We can’t say yet which film hits you might see here (since we just started negotiating about this) but you can look forward to invitations. Meet Factory seems to be an ideal place for meetings of people with and without learning disabilities. The neighbours from other studios are also friendly and we will be happy if you pay us a visit some time. The projects that enable us to make films with people with learning disabilities, organize cultural and educational events and be part of the Meet Factory community are co-financed by European Social Fund, the state budget of the Czech Republic and the budget of the city of Prague.
