Three years ago I responded an ad looking for filmmakers around the world to join a project which goal was to create a feature film made out of segments that each filmmaker would write and shoot in their own cities. 

It is called CollabFeature and three years later, on May 25th, we will Premiere the first Collaborative Feature Film made out of 25 segments from directors spread all over the world, from Sao Paulo to Mumbai, Chicago to Berlin, Bogotá to Hong Kong and everything in between. The fillm is called “The Owner” and it follows a Backpack that travels around the world looking for its owner, while triggering different stories in genres that range from drama to horror, comedy to thriller.

Most of the directors have never met and all collaboration was made through an Internet interface set up by the project directors Marty Shea and Ian Bonner in Detroit , USA. We pitched ideas, voted on our favorites, gave feedback, wrote scripts that needed to take in consideration the before and after links to other segments from other directors, we scheduled and everyone shot independetly and on its own budget their four to five minute segment. We edited and posted cuts through Vimeo where we could leave feedback and fine tune links. Then all segments were assembled until we had a fully fleshed narrative feature film, with a single plot and several stories. 

We have interacted as a family with our ups and downs, failures and successes, fights and celebrations, but mainly we managed to complete something unprecedented which could even get a Guiness Record recognition as the film with most directors in the world.

This is not an anthology film like “New York I love you” or “Paris, je t’aime“ where different shortfilms are simply played one after another under a single theme with no relaition to each other. This is not a Crowdsourced movie like the interesting “Life in a day” where footage from all over the world was assembled into a single Documentary film, this is a fully weaved single narrative fiction feature film with several segments from cities in five continents.

We have garnered press from all over the world: The Huffington Post, The Indian Times, Vision Magazine and even a small piece on CNN (Spanish and English) among many other articles and blog posts. And we even managed to get a sales agent that will be representing us at this year´s Film Market during the Cannes Film Festival.

It´s all exciting and we decided to Premiere our film on the symbolic date of May 25th. 25th as in 25 filmmakers and May being the 5th month of the year representing the 5 continents where the film was shot.

We will premiere in Berlin at the iconic Kino Moviemento in Kreuzberg, you can get your tickets here and you can RSVP on Facebook if you want.  If you´re travelling or have friends all over the world take a look at www.collabfeature.com/screenings to get a full listing of our screenings. New cities are added regularly.

And if you want to win a ticket for the Berlin Premiere, join our mailing list on the top right column to get instructions on how to take part.

We are preparing a second film which has almost finished principal photography and they are always looking for new filmmakers around the world to take part in upcoming projects, so head to www.collabfeature.com and apply.  

Take a look at our trailer:

Watch this video on YouTube.