The Helper is on the way: Hong Kong film about migrant workers gets closer to completion
After a successful Kickstarter campaign raised US$89,000, the makers of a documentary about the city’s domestic helpers have completed the first phase of their work – but much remains to be done to ready it for submission to the Toronto film festival in June
In August last year filmmaker Joanna Bowers hosted a dinner party to celebrate months of hard work putting together a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a documentary about domestic helpers in Hong Kong. At midnight she went online, hit the button to kick off the campaign and went to bed.
“The next morning I was at my computer. The first person to pledge was my best friend and the next group of pledges – and they were big pledges – were people I didn’t know. I burst into tears,” says Bowers.
The emotional response was perhaps in part due to pregnancy hormones – her daughter, Jemima, was born in December – but mainly it was the joy at seeing that so many people wanted to support the project.
In just 30 days she and her team raised US$89,000 and even more donations came in after the campaign ended.
Tony Verb, one of two producers working with Bowers on the film, says during the campaign he got calls from friends in Hollywood saying it wasn’t possible to raise the kind of money they were hoping to get for a documentary, that it might have been possible in the early days of Kickstarter but the market was now oversaturated.