Chicken and Egg Pictures
Chicken and Egg Pictures is a film fund that provides financial, producing and creative support to emerging and veteran women filmmakers at strategic points in the development, completion and launch of their non-fiction and fiction films.

Co-founded in 2006, Julie Parker Benello, Wendy Ettinger and Judith Helfand, themselves award winning non-fiction producers/directors (THE WAR ROOM/’93, BLUE VINYL/’02, EVERYTHING’S COOL/’07), have aggregated over twenty years of collective experience as producers, social-justice philanthropists, mentors, practitioners and advocates of rigorous impact-driven audience engagement campaigns to create a unique venture that is dynamic, resonant and responsive to the needs of the field.

C & E supports women filmmakers who are passionate, tenacious and committed to making socially conscious, entertaining, cinematically and personally challenging films. They are willing to take creative risks, hone a unique and necessary voice and be an active part of a filmmaking community that takes and “gives back” via mentorship. They won’t stop till their films are done and out in the world in a meaningful way. In partnership with Working Films, C & E strives to insure that audience engagement and outreach starts early so that the eggs have legs!

Working Films
Working Films was co-founded by veteran film festival curator and media educator Robert West and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and organizer Judith Helfand in late 1999.

We are neither a production company nor a distributor. We work with filmmakers — at every stage — to maximize their work in coordinated community education efforts, consumer organizing campaigns, activist movements and classroom projects. We work with organizers to enrich their on-going grassroots efforts with relevant, vital media. We work with educators to bring into the classroom critical independent film and video on issues of social and economic justice. With a diverse staff and board, we are an innovative, active and strategic resource for the world of independent film, serving a national role as strategists, consultants and community builders.

Toxic Comedy Pictures
Toxic Comedy Pictures is a production company co-founded by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand to create original, entertaining media with a social conscience and a sense of humor. The feature length documentary that launched this enterprise is BLUE VINYL, a project that offered the filmmakers and their collaborators (animators, editors and composers) the opportunity to experiment with what they have come to call "toxic comedy".

Balancing the serious with the subversive, popular entertainment with corporate accountability, horror and hubris, unexpected twists with equally unexpected turns they produced what critics and audiences agreed was a crowd pleaser; some in the green building movement consider BLUE VINYL to be their very own “cult classic”! As filmmakers it was deeply satisfying to know that the film was playing a role in the long-term effort to transform a toxic marketplace. (Check out the audience-engagement/consumer organizing campaignwww.myhouseisyourhouse.org, coordinated by Working Films) Knowing that freed us up mentally to stop worrying (just a little bit) about bio-accumulation of toxic chemicals and start wondering how we could be useful in the struggle to address or at the very least message and frame global warming.

And now EVERYTHING'S COOL.