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about the worldwide AIDS crisis? It was no blockbuster,
but it was endorsed by the United Nations and did well
enough at international film festivals to find distributors
in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.
Bigfoot CEO Kacy Andrews was pleased with the film’s
reception: “The positive response from critics and audi-
ences,” she said, “… once again affirms our conviction to
promote independent filmmakers.”
Bigfoot Entertainment is responsible for a host of
independently produced films, many of which follow
similar distribution paths to venues and audiences
around the world. The company, says Andrews, “is
dedicated to the community of filmmakers who possess
the vision and passion to create critically acclaimed
independent films.” It was founded in 2004 by a Ger-
man serial entrepreneur named Michael Gleissner, who
is in some ways a model for the sort of creative people
that Bigfoot likes to back. He was certainly the model
for the hero of Hui Lu, a 2007 Bigfoot film that Gleiss-
ner wrote and directed about a highly successful young
entrepreneur who sells his company but finds himself
pushed to the edge despite his millions. “What was I
going to do,” Gleissner replied when asked about his
unusual career move, “buy more boats, buy more
houses? I discovered there’s a creative side in me.”
Gleissner was an e-commerce pioneer in Germany,
where he founded Telebook, Germany’s number-one
online bookstore, and WWW-Service GmbH, the
country’s first, and one of its most successful, web-
hosting companies. In 1998, he sold Telebook to
Amazon.com, where he served two years as a vice
president before cashing in and, in 2001, moving to
Asia to make it a base for a new round of entrepreneur-
ial activities. When he bought Bigfoot, it was an e-mail
management firm, but Gleissner quickly re-created it as
an international entertainment company whose main
business, according to its mission statement, is produc-
ing and financing “innovative entertainment content,
including independent feature films, television series,
and reality shows.” As head of Bigfoot, Gleissner served
as executive producer on Midnight Movie and 3 Nee-
dles, as well as on Irreversi, his second effort at writing
and directing, and on Shanghai Kiss, in which he also
tried his hand at acting.
Bigfoot maintains offices in Los Angeles and a small
production facility in Venice, California, but the cen-
terpiece of its operations is Bigfoot Studios, which
opened in 2004 on the island of Mactan, in Cebu,
home to the second-largest city in the Philippines. The
state-of-the-art facility features six large soundstages,
fully equipped editing suites and sound-mixing studios,
and the latest in high-tech cameras and other equip-
ment. In 2007, under the auspices of Bigfoot Properties,
Gleissner expanded Bigfoot Studios as the first phase of
Bigfoot Center, a complex that will eventually house
not only film and TV production facilities but also Big-
foot Executive Hotel, an array of restaurants, boutiques,
and sidewalk shops, and an 11-story office building
(home to Bigfoot Outsourcing, which specializes in
business-process services). The Bigfoot Center in the
Philippines, by the way, should not be confused with
the 26-story Bigfoot Centre in Hong Kong, where Big-
foot Properties is headquartered.
Gleissner’s goal is to turn Cebu into a destination of
choice for filmmakers who want to cut costs by shoot-
ing and finishing movies outside the United States, and
when Bigfoot Entertainment finds a film suitable for
financing and development, the deal usually requires
the director to do some production work at the Cebu
facility. By the time the studio opened in 2004, the
Philippines were already an attractive location for
animators looking for inexpensive post-production help,
but the pool of talent available for work on live-action
films was quite limited. Gleissner’s solution? He founded
the International Academy of Film and Television
(IAFT), not only to staff Bigfoot Studios but also to train
what executive director Keith Sensing calls “the next
generation of global filmmakers.” IAFT, says Sensing,
looks for creative people who “have a desire for adventure”
and “an education that will set them apart from people
who have a strictly Hollywood background.”
IAFT enrollment is currently 60 percent international
and 40 percent Filipino, but “all of our students,” says
Sensing, “have the opportunity to participate in real pro-
jects going on at Bigfoot Studios … . Many IAFT gradu-
ates,” he adds, “have gone on to write, produce, and direct
their own films” and often follow in Bigfoot’s steps by
finding distribution for their independent features on
the international festival circuit. Three recent graduates
landed jobs on Gleissner’s most recent project, a
Philippines-set thriller revolving around a female diver.
Gleissner not only cowrote and directed Deep Gold but
also drew on his experience as an underwater photogra-
pher to shoot key scenes in Bigfoot’s specially designed
170,000-gallon Underwater Studio.
In 2010, Bigfoot moved to expand into the areas of
acquisition, distribution, and foreign sales with the pur-
chase of Ascendant Pictures. Much like Bigfoot itself,
Ascendant carved out its niche in the industry by inte-
grating the budgeting sensibility of “indie” producers
with the marketing skills of larger studios. “Our schools
are profitable,” explains Andrews, “but overall we’re
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