The Last Ferry: a documentary about the island schools

Thirty-one children and one timetable

There are four schools left on the islands we have been filming. Between them they teach thirty-one children. Three of the four depend on a teacher who commutes by ferry, and when the winter timetable drops to one crossing a day, the school day is decided by a shipping company rather than by anyone in education.

We started filming in the autumn of 2024 expecting a short piece about rural schooling. Two years later we have 240 hours of footage, four families who let us into their houses in a way we did not expect, and a story about what happens to a place when the last school closes.

What is finished and what is not

Principal photography is complete. We have a two-hour and forty-minute assembly edit that works, in the sense that people watch it without checking their phones, and does not work, in the sense that it is fifty minutes too long. What this campaign funds is the whole of post-production: the edit, the grade, the sound, the archive licensing and the festival strategy that decides whether anyone outside a screening room ever sees it.

• 240 hours filmed across nine trips and two winters, entirely self-funded so far.
• Assembly cut is locked in structure; the fine cut needs sixteen weeks with an editor.
• Access agreements are signed with all four schools and every family who appears.
• A regional broadcaster has seen forty minutes and asked to see the finished film.

The post-production budget

Nothing in this budget is speculative. Every line is a quote from someone we have already worked with.

• $14,200 — Sixteen weeks of editing An editor we have made two films with, at a rate that is roughly two thirds of her commercial one because she wants to do this.
• $7,800 — Sound design and mix Five weeks. Ferry engines, classrooms and a great deal of wind, which is the hardest thing to fix in a mix.
• $5,600 — Colour grade and finishing Two winters shot on three different cameras need real work to look like one film.
• $4,400 — Archive and music licensing Nine minutes of regional television archive from the eighties, plus two pieces of music.
• $3,900 — Subtitling and festival submissions English, French and German subtitles, and entry fees for eighteen festivals.
• $3,000 — Contingency and platform fees Held for the licence that turns out to cost triple, because one always does.

One of the mothers asked us what happens to the film if the school closes before we finish. We said we would still finish it. She said that was the wrong answer.

Who we are

Blue Iron Film Collective is nine people split between Istanbul and Nairobi, working mostly on documentary and mostly slowly. Mehmet Aydin directs and edits; this is his third feature-length film and the first two both played festivals and one aired regionally. We fund our work through commercial editing jobs, which is why this film has taken two years of weekends, and why the post-production is the part we cannot absorb ourselves.

Risks and challenges

The most likely failure here is not the film — the footage exists and it is good — but the schedule. Our editor is available from January and if the campaign misses its target we lose that slot and wait until the summer. Archive licensing is the second risk: the broadcaster holding the eighties material has been slow to answer and if the rights turn out to be tangled we will restructure two sequences without it, which we have already storyboarded as a fallback. Festival outcomes are the honest unknown. We can promise a finished film and a schedule; we cannot promise a premiere, and any documentary campaign that does is not being straight with you.