New Cycles

We begin 2025 with many changes and a question pops up. Is 2015 marking the end of a cycle and beginning of another one?

These days remind us of 2005, twenty years ago, when Jac didn’t know where things were going. It was a very difficult year in many ways. At the beginning of 2005 New York was the center of our activities but in that year we were already going through changes; drastic, life altering changes.

During that year we experienced some issues that were affecting the way we were doing things. For a couple of years we dealt with extreme problems that resulted from the 9/11 tragic events in NY. Our system of charging for our products was affected dramatically. The company that made the charges possible could no longer do it, so, for two years we tried different ways, including PayPal, but nothing worked the same way. It looked like the end of what we started back in 1998 was fast approaching. But something else happened.

At the end of that year, 2005, Jac went to a couple of festivals. One of them was in Oruro, Bolivia, it was in November. Jac was invited to show two films there, Martyr and Nocturnia, Amy was part of the full house audience in a beautiful theater with an actual silver screen, she was watching those films.

It was right after that festival, where Amy saw Martyr, that she decided to join Jac in his cinematic adventures and a new cycle of work began.

Jac met Amy, who was visiting Bolivia, a month or so before, when she showed up for a casting call for the NatGeo Docudrama. Both of their lives changed completely on November 15th of 2005, when, instead of going to Chile, as she was planning, she already had her ticket and hotel reservations, she stayed in Bolivia, with Jac, to begin an incredibly productive life.

When putting all that together, the problems, the traveling, the festivals for Martyr and that one event that changed things, the NatGeo documentary, we can say that 2005 was the year when one cycle ended and another one began.

Ten years later Amy announced to Jac that she was leaving for the US. The announcement came after she returned from a long journey, first to Mexico, to show her new film Olalla at the Feratum Film Festival and then to the US, LA mostly, where she was offered to design and organize the film department at a university in Washington State. An offer she couldn’t refuse.

She went to Mexico and LA after we were done with the shooting of Pygmalion, and when she returned she learned that her new film Olalla, was invited to be shown at the same festival where she saw Martyr in 2005.

Amy and Jac went to Oruro, ten years after they met, and this time with Amy’s film, closing an immensely creative cycle. Both Amy and Jac sat on a bench at the city’s main square in front of the theatre where Martyr was shown ten years before, there were tears in their eyes because something too cool was ending, it was a cloudy day, November 15, 2015. It was a sad and sweet moment. Theirs lives were about to change again, dramatically.

But before going back to the US, they still had Justine to produce, which they did right after returning from the festival to La Paz.

Amy and Jac ending a cycle. The very night, after this picture was taken, on the last day of shooting Amy’s scenes on Justine, she was on her way to the US in the middle of December, 2015.

Coincidentally, as it happened in 2005, at the end of 2015, Jac was contacted to work on another NatGeo documentary. Coincidence? A message from the universe?

That made it clear in Jac’s mind that it was the beginning of a completely new cycle, without Amy working with him in amazing movies, as an actress, producer, director, heskinator, but with new projects in store for him, including the NatGeo documentary that took Jac back to the tropics of Bolivia for a many months adventure.

There some surprises ahead as well. New encounters, new possibilities.

Another ten years have passed, and once again, Jac is looking back and ahead, knowing that he is in the middle of closing a cycle and on the verge of the beginning of a new one. We won’t know what the new cycle will consist of until later, maybe even by the end of this year, as it happened in 2005 and 2015.

Maybe we will work on Crucified Four and Maleficaum Excruciati during the closing of this cycle, like we did in 2015, when we closed the ten year cycle producing two films, Pygmalion and Justine.

However, that’s a big maybe because our director lost his bet to our producer. The bet was that we were going to raise another 1000 bucks before the end of March, and it didn’t happen. The campaign is active but there’s no hope that it will be half way successful. It didn’t work after all this time, a few months, where we raised a bit over 500 dollars of a 40,000 goal for the four movies. Sad, tragic, but enlightening.

The bet loser director and the actresses are very, very disappointed and the bet winner but unhappy producer decided to put all plans to produce new movies on hold.

Dani commented, when she found out that the campaign for Crucified Four was completely stuck, that maybe we should consider doing less complicated movies. Jac made her notice that even those less complicated movies were finding difficulties.

And somehow, as it was happening at the end of 2005, we had a terrible week before the end of last month because a terrible incident happened which threatened our very livelihood.

People trying to buy a film from us encountered a message saying Error 16. Apparently our merchant account has a new security set up that suddenly started blocking all IPs coming to our store. The store’s IP was blocked. A big problem because no one could purchase a movie. It meant that there was no longer an income and for over 10 days nothing came in. We went into full panic mode. Was it the end? Did Musk had anything to do with it? After all, Jac is a big critic of him in social media.

It took more than ten days to solve the issue. Fortunately we are selling again, the store is back to normal, but we’re not so confident anymore. We became painfully aware that anything can happen at anytime and we need to have alternatives.

That ungrateful incident made our Producer think that we cannot depend on what we have and we need to look into new ways of producing and selling our films. We need to embrace all the new things that are appearing, like we did way back in 1995 when the age of celluloid and video tapes was coming to an end and the era of digital cinema and the internet was beginning in full force.

Jac embraced that moment in time and by 1998 we had Red Feline Pictures all set up with a webpage, rfpix.com, and we had a new film out, reaching thousands of people out in the World Wide Web, Red Feline On The Cross. It was selling like crazy, a 500 dollar investment bringing in thousands of dollars, and suddenly we were living a whole new life, with new prospects and new ways of doing things.

I can say that the end of 1995, when Jac and Camille took the TV series The Man From the Moon to NY and then went to Paris, where Camille stayed for months, was the end of a Cycle and the beginning of another one. In 1996 Jac and Camille were back in Bolivia, they were shooting all those Via Crucis of Camille videos, leading to the first film to be released in the new cycle, Red Feline on the Cross and leaving Bolivia for New York, a year later, to move on the bran new cycle.

Thanks for the update. It’s sad you don’t have contributors for these new films. I read a post about another Maleficarum film. When are you gonna shoot it? What is it gonna be about?

As we end this cycle and start taking the steps for the new one, we are becoming sadly aware that we are too dependent on the crucifixion genre, which Jac the director truly loves, but that it has a limited fan base, in numbers, that is. And when that fan base shows NO interest in future films, then the Producer in him thinks that it’s time to move on and take other roads.

One of those would be exploring the Inquisition base, which is not bad. We have that amazing script, Maleficarum Excruciati, which needs a lot of cash, locations, a large cast and crew and it takes place in colonial times, of course. It is the story of a young woman accused of witchcraft because the husband of a very domineering lady falls in love with her. Three other women are also accused of the same crime, all four beautiful and young women suffer the tortures of the inquisition and at least a couple of them end up burned alive at the stake. I can’t reveal much more of that, but it promises to be extremely cruel, more than Maleficarum and Monxa Mala combined.

We were thinking on launching a campaign for this new inquisition movie after completing the production of Crucified Four, but we are not so sure a fundraising will work anymore.

One of the instruments of torture we’re thinking of using would be the famous Inquisition Torture Chair, which we would have to design and build and would cost good money. And that’s not the only instrument for that film, we’re thinking of a whole bunch; but we don’t know if we can pull it off, so that project is a nice dream in the director’s head right now.

We have some films in post, which we will be releasing this year, and Jac is working on the CruXbound movies, with some difficulties because a lot of issues get in the way of getting the cast together. They all had issues last year, which prevented them from having time to go into production.

It will take at least another month of work, on a painfully daily basis, to bring those four extreme films to completion. One of them was produced already, in two versions, the one with Simonne. That film is into post production. The other three are still in production. I’ll have more details on their progress by the 15th of March.

We might take another road to do something else all together. Jac is toying with his old plan of working on a Television Series for Netflix or NatGeo, and that could take a good part of the next three years.

In closing, we’re no longer expecting the enthusiastic support for the proposed projects that we were hoping for, but we’ll keep the campaign until the end of March, at which point we will close it for good.

Crucified Four and all the other projects we are planning to work on will be on hold for now. It is becoming painfully obvious that if we want to make those movies, we have to find other ways of financing them.

And that’s where we are at this very moment. I don’t know what will happen in the near future. It’s up to the Producer, who won the bet and it doesn’t make him happy, it’s up to him which way we’re going to go and his principal cast is waiting to know what’s going to happen.

Meanwhile, the director dreams of the other instruments he would love to use in Maleficarum Excruciati. One of them is the infamous Judas Cradle. He told Dani that she would suffer a lot sitting on that contraption. Would she be willing to go through that? We won’t know, at least not for now.