Twenty filmmakers rallied in San Francisco this week to participate in ITVS’s latest producers orientation for Open Call funding. Among the crop were filmmakers Jamila Wignot and Sierra Pettengill, whose documentary Town Hall examines three personalities who become emblematic figures of the Tea Party Movement. The pair offered BTB this recap of their experience at orientation.

Filmmakers Jamila Wignot and Sierra Pettengill (Town Hall)

In the late spring and early summer of 2010 we made a leap of faith. With a bit of savings, a borrowed car, and friends/family to provide us shelter, we abandoned the highly structured and familiar world of commissioned television documentaries and struck out on our own, on a journey to understand an emergent new breed of American conservatism. We were guided only by our own personal curiosity and belief that the contours of this emerging political movement were about something deeper than left and right, republican and democrat, red state and blue state.
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