By Shannon Hicks

At the beginning of this month, a feature film called Helene made its debut at the New York International Independent Film Festival. The film offers the story of Janette, who has traveled from France to New York City for the funeral of her sister, the film’s title character. Upon arriving in the Big Apple, however, Janette learns there is much more under the surface of what she has been told about her sister’s death and the subsequent funeral.

It turns out Janette’s sister Helene is not dead after all — and this isn’t a big secret in the movie, so it doesn’t ruin the storyline by mentioning that or consequent events at this point. Janette begins an intense search for Helene, eventually turning to a television production facility that creates a show called The Mating Game. Once she befriends one of the show’s producers, who agrees to help in the search for the missing sister using the show’s surveillance equipment and crew, Janette’s life begins to look like something out of a spy novel, complete with stakeouts, a dead body that turns up in someone’s apartment, mysterious art thieves, and even a shootout.

Helene is the first feature produced by MacMillan Films, a Greenwich-based production company under the leadership of founder James Thomas. Filming of Helene took over two years to complete, primarily because the work was done only on weekends, divided between Greenwich and Manhattan shoots. The film shares something with one of the biggest films of 1999 in that, like The Blair Witch Project, Helene was filmed using primarily hand-held cameras, which produced a more artistic effect.

The cinematographer for Helene was a Bulgarian named Krikor Haladjian, a Sandy Hook resident. Mr Haladjian’s primary job was to create the appropriate lighting for each scene, which had him working closely with the director and camera crew.

“For the shoots, for the entire look of the film, we used the hand-held,” Mr Haladjian said over the phone recently. He and Mr Thomas were in Ohio earlier this month, filming the Daytona 500 for clients. “That’s what was really needed for this script.

“The camera worker should not be obtrusive. He should be going smoothly, and covering the whole area of the movie,” continued the cinematographer. “You want to help achieve the director’s point of view of the movie.”

Not only was the use of a hand-held what was suitable for the telling of this story, but it also helped for a production company that was working only on weekends. To continue setting up, and then breaking down, a complete set for two days’ work every week would have been too time-consuming.

Advance publicity for Helene was exciting, with NY International Film and Video Festival director Jessica Beshir calling the release “one of the best features we’re premiering this year” and “a great story, unusually constructed and with a great ending… an ambitious project.” Helene was completed with a budget of under $20,000.

Once shooting was finished, the next step was to take thousands of hours of film and pare it down into a continuous presentation. The result was the 104-minute suspense thriller that was submitted to the film festival in New York. The entire film was edited at Mr Haladjian’s home in Sandy Hook.

“[Krikor] uses non-linear editing machines, which is like a word processor for pictures,” Mr Thomas explained. “You manipulate all the images and print out the final product.”

MacMillan Films, previously called MacMillan Gap Productions, already has a long commercial and corporate image film track record. The company has in the past created commercials for ABC Sports, QVC Network, Gitano, New Retail Concepts (the makers of Candies shoes and No Excuses clothing) and Kaboodles, a company that makes makeup organizers. Now MacMillan Films is moving into a different vein: Helene is the first film to come out of the Greenwich-based company.

The next step with Helene is to locate a distributor for the feature. “The challenge is to find a good distributor, and then we can pay back our investors, which is the most important thing,” James Thomas explained. “There are a lot of markets, everything from home sales on video to all kinds of international distribution details, or digital distribution deals, which is a new way to distribute films to small theatres. You don’t even need to make a film print.

“Ideally, the dream scenario is theatre distribution,” continued Mr Thomas. “But that’s very competitive, especially in the United States.”

MacMillan Films has a pair of films “in the wings right now,” Mr Thomas said. The company needs the financing to move them forward, which brings the focus back to the results of the Helene project. If MacMillan finds a distributor and pays back its investors for Helene, then it builds its reputation as a solid investment. Which in turn means another collaboration for the Sandy Hook cinematographer.

For now, Mr Haladjian is content with the final cut of Helene, while he and Mr Thomas await word from the film festival. Any awards from the festival could only help with the search for a distributor.

“I’m happy, very happy, with the way [the film] turned out,” said Mr Haladjian. “There’s always a scene that you look at that you think you could have done better, but with the resources we had, we achieved more than what we were thinking we were going to be able to do. I was very pleased in the end.”