Founded by Michele Lukea Esteves in 2010, Closest Eves Films is an independent film production company, currently in development on several short and feature film productions. Our aim is to gain a reputation for developing and delivering bold, original narrative films that challenge and inspire an audience by creating naturalistic Australian films that appeal to a global market.
Our philosophy is to develop engaging films that address dramatic human stories. Aimed at a niche market, our films set romance and/or dramatic narratives against a backdrop of issues relating to domestic violence, civil disobedience, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, guerilla resistance movements or the struggles of daily life in violence-ridden communities.
As creative producers, we aim to collaborate with writer/directors who understand the intended audience and market for our Films. A similar audience to SBS and World Movie channel subscribers, our target audience market avidly watches foreign language or arthouse films and prefer to watch SBS and ABC TV programs, such as At the Movies, Dateline and Foreign Correspondent over soaps and melodramas. They listen to music in more than one language, read literature and travel to exotic locations, at times off the beaten path.
As a part of a niche market, it’s imperative to our success that we engage and
create a dialogue with our audience as early as possible. From our foundation, we implemented a social networking strategy to identify, reach and build our audience/market by exploiting social media platforms with accounts on twitter, facebook, youtube, itunes and a monthly blog.
Our objective is to make bold, emotive films at an appropriate budget and will work in collaboration with other writers, directors, and key creatives who understand the need to keep production budget costs low and production values high. We will adopt a sustainable business model that embraces the potential offered by inexpensive digital equipment and software, and digital crowdfunding/marketing strategies.
Believing that creative collaboration should be rewarded through a revenue sharing model, we will adopt a minimum award based fee structure on all productions. In return for upfront minimum fees, cast and crew will receive a percentage of the producer’s net profit (PNP) pool. Furthermore, we will also adopt a hybrid production-distribution strategy to retain more control and ownership over our films distribution rights. With a goal to co-distribute or self-distribute in some territories, we will collaborate with consultants to design marketing strategies, book theatres and collect revenue.
In order to achieve a sustainable hybrid model, we understand the need to develop long-term relationships with distributors both locally in Australia, as well as, in territories throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and North America. Therefore, our aim is to attend the major film marketplaces in Australia and worldwide starting in 2011. With the advantage that at marketplaces, we can simultaneously, look for similar completed films from other territories to distribute locally within Australia and sell or promote our own project slate to other distributors.
