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The Headlines
Creator, Writer and Producer Mikayla Goetz is leading the development and production by Boots On The Ground Theater (BOTG) of a full-length documentary, Aliyah, chronicling the unstoppable efforts of Ukrainian Jews to find a better life in their homeland and in Israel.
Based on months of in-person interviews that Goetz collected in Ukraine during 2017, with her boots on the ground all over that country including the Russia-seized combat zone, Aliyah portrays actual Jewish Ukrainians as they rediscover their identity in a land marked by the sordid history of Ukrainian pogroms, Nazi atrocities, and intolerance lasting even until today.
Development, Production And Distribution Strategy
The Aliyah documentary is already in development. Scripts are written, talent contracted, full shot plan completed, and >$30,000 in unrestricted funds from angel funders to cover initial development costs. Shooting is scheduled for March, 2020 with post-production to be completed by October, 2020.
Distribution is anchored in a multi-level plan:
- National and international Jewish film festivals, including Boca Raton Jewish Film Festival, the Jüdische Filmtage in Munich, the Donald M. Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, the Brooklyn Israel Film Festival, Docaviv International Film Festival in Tel Aviv, 3JPL Israeli Film Festival (Montreal), and the New York Jewish Film Festival.
- Major museums and change-maker organizations, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC (aware of the production), Smithsonian, The Peace Institute, The European Institution, the Library of Congress and House and Senate members.
- Film and video distributors and presenters, including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.
Media, PR and Legal.
Media and Public Relations support has been secured with the National Performing Arts Funding Exchange and its partner organizations. Legal support will be defined in a Memorandum of Understanding between Boots On The Ground Theater and a major law firm specializing in media and entertainment. The production team is open to dialogue with other potential partners regarding opportunities, sponsorships, and possibilities for engagement.
CONTACT
Charlotte Overby: coverby@botgtheater.org (+1) 843.655.4953
Mikayla Goetz: mikayla@botgtheater.org (+1) 321.537.3464
Cliff Brody: cbrody@npafe.org (+1) 202.213.3076
The Storyline
A documentary cast in new storytelling form as surprising and compelling today as the Ken Burns’ Civil War series was in 1990, Aliyah is the true story of today’s Jewish Ukrainians seeking a better life in Israel in the face of insufferable 21st century intolerance in their native country, all fed by the region’s long history of persecution and anti-Semitism.
Aliyah Trailer shoot
Guided by a “Woman In Green”, each seemingly disconnected vignette in Aliyah carries the audience into a unique mini-world of a real person’s fight for survival – and the chance to emigrate to Israel – all while facing a lineage of insidious religious and cultural intolerance. Presented more out of order than in a logical chronology, each mini-story in fact is bound tightly to all of the others in a carefully-woven cleverly-sequenced story of tragedy and triumph.
Originality in storytelling is Goetz’s hallmark in Aliyah: 90 riveting minutes of high-class multimedia marked by newly-composed music and original choreography that accentuates the documentary’s actors and dancers: they magically guide us to new locations and characters while carrying the saga forward to an unexpected real-life ending.
For, Aliyah conveys the stark truth: why only some of these Ukrainian Jews succeed in emigrating, while others do not. Audiences will remember both.
And learn from both, which is the point of it all.
The Value Proposition
Aliyah will be the first premium documentary developed and produced by teams in the United States, Europe, and Ukraine marrying music, film and dance for documenting the impact of today’s rising tide of anti-Semitism and intolerance towards immigrants in this country and abroad.
Mikayla Goetz in Kiev, Ukraine
The documentary’s emphasis on the importance and value of individual and organizational efforts to combat intolerance reflects both the historical and contemporary importance both of people working with their “boots on the ground” and of those people who give their time and funding to enable those boots on the ground to be on scene, helping where it counts the most.
The unexpected Aliyah “composition” of narrative, acting, music, and dance is intentional, promising long-term respect and recognition for Aliyah’s backers, supporters, and any commercial streamers taking up the project.
Choreography rehearsal for Aliyah led by Dalton Hedrick
Equally, the project benefits from Mikayla Goetz’s personal and Boots On The Ground’s organizational success meeting the demanding goals of the backers who supported and financed previous Boots On The Ground creative works.
Whether it was the Veteran’s Administration, the Spoleto Festival, an Eau Gallie Arts District performance, or several Wisconsin University campuses, backers were counting on the Boots On The Ground management team to bring in new audiences. Which is exactly what BOTG did.
Achieving that same result exponentially is intrinsic to the design and content of Aliyah.
In uniting traditional and new narrative forms to portray the lives of real people, a major documentary of this unique genre will attract Millennials and younger viewers accustomed to and expecting the marriage of visual, movement and musical representation as integral to storytelling.
The appeal to older audiences is likewise assured, especially given the politics of today: evidence abounds that, despite the voices of hatred and discrimination, there is broad cross-generational passion for discovering practical ways to combat intolerance.
The Comparables
With its groundbreaking choreographic-cinematic style portraying real people confronting fateful moments of escape, life or death, Boots On The Ground’s documentary Aliyah sets new standards for documentary film-making much the same way that Shoah (1985) and The Thin Blue Line (1988) redefined the documentary film genre to the surprise and satisfaction of audiences world-wide.
Readying for shooting the “Aliyah” trailer
Like Shoah, Aliyah proves that the past is never past. As did Shoah filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, Goetz transforms the reflections of survivors, bystanders and, most uneasily, perpetrators. She brings forward to today a Ukrainian legacy of intolerance, pogroms and the Holocaust in an apotheosis of documentary filmmaking: verbal, visual, and choreographic testimony to what was, what is, and what can be when people never give up.
Building on the benchmarks set by Errol Morris in “The Thin Blue Line”, Aliyah employs re-creations of events, borrowing the narrative thrust of fiction, and carrying the audience into the realm of the poetic. Every element of the true stories that Aliyah recounts is real: true tales of victimization with effects that are galvanizing and game-changing. As did The Thin Blue Line, Boots On The Ground’s study in Aliyah will prove that documentaries can become popular hits among older generations but especially the young, people who thirst for the marriage of compelling word, music and dance captured in artful storytelling.
Aliyah Videos
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