Crowdfunding a feature film about Etna wines on Sicily: Maine’s Vite

They make excellent wines on Etna on Sicily. They also have a very unique and spectacularly beautiful landscape. I am not sure if they are good film-makers but they probably are. A new feature film, in production, aims to celebrate all this while also entertain us. It is a crowdfunding project called Maine’s Vite.

Crowdfunding, if you are not familiar with the term, is to ask people on the internet to finance, to help fund, a project you want to do. You post information about the project on a web site. You define what you will give to people if they support the project with money. You set a goal in how much you must raise for the project to go ahead. If you raise enough money you do the project. And voilà.

The best-know crowd-funding platform is Kickstarter.

I have supported, or participated in, two crowdfunding project myself:

A microscope lens for smartphones, which raised $91,525, way beyond the goal of $5000!

A clever, but very simple device to zoom or focus with a DSLR lens when recording video (otherwise not a simple task), that targeted $19,000 that they well exceeded with $26,263.

I have seen several other wine related projects that tries to raise funds with crowdfunding. For example:  The Book on Jura Wine (successfully raised £14,076)  and another wine book called The Essence of Wine (succefully raised $24,240).

The latest wine-related project that I have come across is not on Kickstarter but on a rival crowdfunding site called Indiegogo.

Crowdfunding a wine film

This is a substantially more ambitious project called Maine’s Vite.

Maine’s Vite is a “full fledged” feature film about Maine, an English sound engineer :

“Maine  is an English sound engineer in Sicily for a job with the rock group he works with. After a night’s heavy drinking he is retrieved, unconscious, on the slopes of Mount Etna – the largest live volcano in Europe – by a group of local men who work at the vineyards.

He is taken to the main vineyard where they help him ‘come back from the dead’.

Maine regains consciousness and finds himself in a completely new reality of simplicity and direct contact with the forces of nature. The volcano is a powerful presence that presides over the people and the fertile ground.

[…]

The film celebrates Sicily and the Etna region in particular, for it’s people, wine and contemporary agriculture.”

The Indiegogo Maine’s Vite project aims to raise $120,000! It runs to February 16. If you pitch in $20,000 you can even become co-producer. But you don’t have to spend a fortune. A humble $10 will get you a signed copy of the movie poster, plus the satisfaction of having contributed to the project. And there is a whole range of other benefits you can get from participating.

Read more about the project here: Maine’s Vite crowdfunding Indiegogo project.

The aim of the film is to “celebrates Sicily and the Etna region in particular, for its people, wine and contemporary agriculture”. I have been to Etna a few times and will be going back there in October this coming autumn. I can attest to that they do make very good wines and have a landscape that is beautiful and certainly spectacular. But each time I have been there it has been overcast so I have not yet seen the top of the volcanoe. Hope that will change in October.

Go take a look at the crowdfunding project if you are interested in wine and movies!

Here is a short intro clip: