Cynthia Wade, the Berkshires-based filmmaker who won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, is one step closer to her goal of making full-length fiction films now that her award-winning doc, "Freeheld," has been released by Lionsgate as a full-length film. The movie stars Julianne Moore and Ellen Page as the lesbian couple fighting for rights married heterosexual couples have when one partner is facing death. A lead producer, Wade was able to supply raw details to keep the screenplay and acting as accurate as possible. On Sunday, Oct. 4, Wade will be in attendance for a Q&A at the Berkshire International Film Festival’s screening at The Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, nicely completing the circle that began when BIFF screened her documentary in 2009. My goal was always to make Freeheld into a feature film, and it took seven years. We had a few outlines of the script, then chose Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia. Financing was the hardest part. The producing team was unstoppable but it’s hard to finance a film with two women leads, both lesbians. I was there for accuracy. I brought the team to New Jersey and gave them information that wasn't in the documentary. They paid so much attention to those details, the final outcome is journalistically accurate to the real story. Currently, I'm working on Mudflow, a documentary based in Indonesia, which I am co-directing with Sasha Friedlander; it's in its third year of production. We’ve recently gotten a MacArthur grant and a Ford Foundation grant for the film, which has allowed us to make three new trips to Indonesia. The film will be released in late 2016.
For the past 15 months, I’ve been directing a feature documentary called Generation Startup, about young entrepreneurs in Detroit. That film will also be released in 2016. I’m also a producer of The Gnomist, a short documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film won Best Short Doc at the LA Shortsfest and the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. It will be broadcast on CNN this fall. I’ve been directing more TV commercial and branded documentary work, including a series of commercials featuring real moms and girls talking about ADHD, a feature-length film shot in five countries about ordinary people around the world living with high cholesterol, a short film for Similac, and a series of other "real people" TV spots for companies like Unilever (Dove), Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark. It's time to work on another labor of love, though. Those are the kind of projects that find me and say “make me." Then it becomes a second marriage in my home that my whole family has to live with for a while. But I don’t have a choice; it has to be made. I’m also ready to transition into feature films. I was on the set for Freeheld not just because I was a producer but because I wanted to learn all I could. I’m drawn to stories that have an emotional takeaway, and they’re often about strong women. The subjects may be upsetting, but it’s not worth telling a story if there’s not something tremendously at stake.
