Welcome Spaghetti Western Trailblazers!

Spaghetti Western

Filmmakers' Digital Diary 1

28 July 2025

This is the first of our digital diaries and it is a special one. My name is Jessica, I’m the writer / director of Spaghetti Western and please imagine this note as a warm hello, a welcoming in and to those who do not mind a more familiar greeting, an enthusiastic "Howdy".

Often in filmmaking, different levels of access to the creative process are afforded to cast and crew depending on their status, like the army. Not here. We see all our Spaghetti Western funders as our core community - we are on this Wagon Trail together after all. To honour that our digital diary is a bi-weekly opportunity to share with you all aspects of the filmmaking process. Through this digital diary you will hear from the filmmakers, see how a film is created, the challenges, the triumphs and eventually the amazing magic of how it all comes together on screen. If you have questions about making a movie, or the story, or our team, please send them in and we aim to answer everything you’re curious about.

For me, as a director, my vision for Spaghetti Western comes in two parts: one about the film and the other way the film is made. The first essential mission of Spaghetti Western is to tell a brilliant story - offering a new take on traditional westerns, reclaiming the genre through a female lens. So, what does that look like? Food, community, an epic adventure, empowering diverse voices in history and championing complex, interesting heroines with agency. There will be gun fights, there will be beautiful scenery with story-led framing, there will be cooking and most of all, there will be meaning.

The second essential mission of Spaghetti Western is to empower women to invest in film, many who may have never invested in a movie before. Why? Although there are more women producers, directors and writers than ever before, the people funding film and TV are predominantly men. While they support what they like to see, women are forced to shift their visions to please the gate keepers. Until more women investors are holding the purse strings, women's imaginations remain corseted. We hope by the time Spaghetti Western is wrapped (when a movie finishes filming) there will be an army of new, female executive producers who now feel empowered to continue to fund female voices in film. Spaghetti Western will be the first film ever to be funded by women angels, like you. We hope this happens more, over and over again.

In college I majored in Folklore and Mythology…it was perfect training for film. Film is our modern mythology, it acts like a mirror, reflecting our sense of ourselves, each other and any aspirations for our future. Want to take an emotional litmus test of how our society is doing? Look at the stories we tell. Our fears, hopes, values and sense of what's possible is laid bare on the movie screen…and more recently, Netflix.

Currently, our cultural mythology is lopsided, like a wagon with a broken wheel. It's time for that to change, and it begins...now, with you.

So to kick things off, we'd love to share - for your eyes only - a music video with you. This was created during the recording session for Spaghetti Western's soundtrack. (In the great tradition of Westerns, we recorded the music first). Musicians gathered in Ireland where Rhiannon Giddens, the musical goddess and our musical director, took modern music back to its folk roots.

Here the band is playing "My Old Friend the Blues". The band themselves will be in the film and are playing this song in the first act, while sitting on the porch of the general store in Eden, as our heroine, Elena, follows her husband's coffin through the town:

My Old Friend the Blues

We're so glad you are here on the journey with us. Wagon's Ho!