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Alexis Krasilovsky has made a lot of sacrifices over the years in an effort to produce her documentaries. She lived in a shack along the Mississippi for two months, lost relationships, lived in poverty and worked a lot of long days. Has it been worth it?

Absolutely. "It's a tough life, but it makes you alive," she says. "It's a heightened sense of reality."

Krasilovsky is now an award-winning documentary producer whose work has aired on The Learning Channel and PBS. But it was a career that almost ended before it started.

Krasilovsky was just putting the finishing touches on a documentary of the New York art scene, featuring Andy Warhol and other prominent artists, when disaster struck. "My film was in a rusty tin can in the back of someone's van and someone broke into the van and stole the rough cut of the film," she says.

Krasilovsky saw her career go up in smoke as she heard the news. She had basically decided to call it quits -- then she spoke to one of her professors at Yale University.

"At this point, nobody in their right mind would have continued, but one of my professors said to me, 'If you don't finish this film now, you'll never be a filmmaker,'" she says.

Krasilovsky went back to the drawing board and started again with the film. Despite a bumpy start, the film turned out to be a great success and is still in distribution today.

Krasilovsky's art scene documentary kicked off a string of successful films for her. But even with this success, the process didn't get much easier. Money was still tight. Krasilovsky recalls the irony of putting the wraps on a documentary about blues musicians just as the electric company was shutting off her power for an unpaid bill.

Her next project found Krasilovsky living with sharecroppers in a trailer along the Mississippi River. "I went to live with sharecroppers in their trailer with seven cats, five dogs and a rooster," she says. While this rustic setting helped Krasilovsky learn more about her subjects, there was another advantage to this setting. It saved her $200 per month.

Like most documentary producers, Krasilovsky admits her work is a labor of love. In fact, she's even sworn off making films a few times because they keep her from making money and they're exhausting to do. "Lots of times I've said, 'That's it, no more,' especially when I became a full professor at California State," says Krasilovsky. Yet she always comes back to documentaries.

One of her recent productions, called Epicenter U, focused on the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake and its impact on herself and her students. Krasilovsky felt compelled to tell this story in the best way she knew how -- through a documentary film.

In this way, the film spoke for her and her experience of the quake.

Likewise, Paul Arneault found his voice many years ago when he produced a documentary of his travels in India. For him, this was a way to make sense of everything he was seeing.

"I was overwhelmed by just about everything in India. I'd seen things like the Taj Mahal as well as children collecting dung to make bricks in the city," says Arneault.

This early project changed the way Arneault looks at things. He can see a documentary in almost anything. He says he'd be broke and very old by the time even half of them were made.

The reality is, Arneault has to make a living. He does this by overseeing the production of educational documentaries on subjects like history and science. It's in his spare time that Arneault makes his own documentaries.

One of his projects documented the development of a local theater, its struggles and successes. "This group had some really innovative approaches, one of which was to include the audience in certain parts of the production," he says.

Arneault is well aware of the funding problems independent documentary producers face. When producing educational films, Arneault is in charge of making sure there are enough buyers for the films before they even get made. In making other types of documentaries, he has to use every resource he can. The chances of these films making any money are slim to none.

The lack of funding is frustrating because Arneault sees documentaries growing in popularity. The problem is in the distribution.

"It's a miserable job to try and get these films distributed in any large way," says Arneault, who believes if people had more access to documentaries, they would demand more. "A well-made documentary is interesting for the same reasons well-made films are interesting. They are about something compelling, structured, visual, moving and educational, in a broad sense."

The financing difficulties have not stopped him from dreaming about new documentaries, however. Arneault is planning to return to India, this time with a bigger budget and years of experience behind him.

"I'm hoping to capture the vision I had [then]," says Arneault. "I can't wait to get started."

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