Crystal Swan
TFI Suppport
TFI Network 2018
Logline
In 1990s Belarus, a wanderlust young DJ is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application, forcing her to a backwater factory town where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream.
Darya Zhuk
Director, Co-Screenwriter
Darya Zhuk left Minsk, Belarus at the age of 16 to study in the US. Six years later with a cum lade B.A. degree from Harvard University, Darya Zhuk started creating both narrative and documentary independent films. She is a proud honors graduate of Columbia MFA program in Directing. Films she wrote and directed have been selected to SXSW, Tarkovsky, Oaxaca, Atlanta, Palm Springs, Santa Fe Independent film festivals just to name a few. She received best female writer-director award from New York Women in Film and Television in 2015 and has been nominated for the best female director by Adrienne Shelly Foundation. She received special jury prize for her short THE REAL AMERICAN at Listopad Film Festival in Minsk. She is the winner of such prestigious film grants as New York State Council for the Arts, Panavision Emerging Filmmaker grant, and Interdisciplinary Council for the Art of Columbia University grants. She is in post-production on her festival-bound feature film CRYSTAL SWAN. Co-produced between Belarus-Germany-US, with Vice Film executive producing on the US side, it already won the best international Works in Progress feature at A-level POFF film festival in Tallinn, Estonia.
Debbie Vandermeulen
Producer
Debbie Vandermeulen, founder of Fusion Features, has successfully helped filmmakers turn their ideas into profitable cinematic entertainment. Debbie is adept in ensuring the bottom line responsibility for the development, financing and management and operation of both domestically and internationally launched projects. Debbie’s projects have earned recognition at renowned festivals including Cannes, Sundance and Toronto. Debbie has producer credits for several features, including the most recent feature film, BRAHMAN NAMAN in competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, which sold to Netflix at the festival. Other feature projects include GUYS READING POEMS, starring Patricia Velasquez (THE MUMMY); LIFE TRACKER starring Rebecca Marshall (SAW 3D) and Matt Dallas (Kyle XY); MY ELEVENTH with Executive Producer Bryan Singer and starring John Benjamin Hickey (THE BIG C) and Marin Hinkle (TWO AND A HALF MEN); and the documentary, WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE DINGLE.
Additionally, Debbie is working with Mark R. Harris, producer of the Academy Award-winning films CRASH and GODS & MONSTERS, and London-based producer Patrick Holzen. The team is in pre-production on AGAAT, based on the book of the same name, which was celebrated by Oprah’s Book Club as a “must read.” Debbie has chaired, judged and participated in many prominent film festivals around the world. She has served as Executive Director for the Foundation of International Film Artists as well as provided services as a film consultant for international screenwriting labs.
Birgit Gernböck
Producer
Gernböck is currently traveling the festival circuit with Darya Zhuk's feature film CRYSTAL SWAN, shot on location in Minsk, Belarus in collaboration with Vice Media and supported by the German Film Fund. The drama is the first submission from the former Soviet Republic nation since 1996, and follows a young female Belarusian hip-hop DJ in the mid-1990s who dreams of emigrating to join the American music scene.
Helga Olshvang
Screenwriter
Helga Landauer Olshvang was born in Moscow, where she graduated from Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. She wrote numerous screenplays for feature, animation and documentary films, and worked at Russian National Television directing programs for broadcast. Helga has lived and worked in the United States since 1996 as a writer, poet and a filmmaker. Her films include (1998), A Journey of Dmitry Shostakovich (2006, co-directed with Oksana Dvornichenko), (2008), (2009), Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear (2011) and Arcadia (2015). They have been screened at many international film festivals and significant American and European venues, including the Louvre and Carnegie Hall. She has authored five books of poetry, under the name of Helga Olshvang: (Composer Publishing House); (Pushkinskiy Fond), Versions of the Present (Russian Gulliver Publishing) and The Three (Ailuros, NY). Her poetry has also been published and reviewed in preeminent Russian literary magazines and anthologies.