Just getting a movie made and getting it in front of audiences is crazy-ambitious.

The makers of “Give Me Liberty” have an even crazier ambition: for their movie, made in Milwaukee by filmmakers from Milwaukee, to help launch the city as a filmmaking center.

For that to happen, the movie has to be successful — especially in its hometown.

So, no pressure or anything.

“I don’t want to sound cocky, but I don’t know when Milwaukee is going to have another movie like this,” said director Kirill Mikhanovsky, who co-wrote “Give Me Liberty” with his filmmaking partner and producer, Alice Austen.

To date, Milwaukee really hasn’t had a movie like “Give Me Liberty.” In the past eight months, it has shown, to acclaim, at two of the world’s biggest film festivals; landed U.S. and worldwide distribution; and, on Aug. 23, begins a staggered nationwide release, with first stops in Milwaukee and New York.

“In the history of feature filmmaking in Wisconsin made by Wisconsin residents, there’s less than a handful of (fiction) films that have gotten distribution, let alone international distribution … and played film festivals,” said Jonathan Jackson, chief executive director and artistic director of Milwaukee Film. “This is arguably a landmark moment for feature filmmaking in Milwaukee.”

“Give Me Liberty,” which has its U.S. theatrical premiere at a sold-out screening Aug. 22 at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theatre, is an indie-film take on some old-fashioned ideas: bridging divides and the American dream.

The movie follows a chaotic winter day in the life of Vic (Chris Galust), a Russian immigrant who's a medical transport van driver in Milwaukee, driving people with disabilities where they need to go. When he agrees to take a bunch of Russian senior citizens (including his grandfather) and a gregarious ex-boxer named Dima (Maksim Stoyanov) to a funeral across town, it gets Vic in trouble with his boss and with a strong-willed, wheelchair-using, African American woman with ALS named Tracy (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer) who relies on the van to get to and from her work.

Making things more difficult for all of them: Streets are blocked off by protests following a shooting. As the day spirals out of everyone’s control, these disparate people juggle their differences with their common humanity, making connections along the way.

The comedy-drama was filmed on Milwaukee’s north and west sides, with additional scenes in Shorewood, the east side and other locations. Several scenes take place at the Eisenhower Center, a vocational training and employment services center at 4425 W. Woolworth Ave., and east side eatery Ma Fischer’s is one of several familiar city spots getting a shout-out.

Many in the cast — including the two leads — are making their screen debuts. A number of the performers are non-actors from Milwaukee.

Polished with a cinema-vérité feel, “Give Me Liberty” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, getting rave reviews from The New York Times, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, among others. In May, it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival – only the fourth time that a movie has screened there after playing another festival.

It landed an international distributor (Wild Bunch) at Sundance and a U.S. distributor (Chicago-based Music Box) just before Cannes – both impressive accomplishments for a low-budget movie (around $1 million) set in a city not normally seen on the big screen.

Two years ago, it wasn’t clear the movie would happen at all.

A movie inspired by Milwaukee

Mikhanovsky, a fast-talking, faster-thinking filmmaker, immigrated to Milwaukee from Russia, and studied linguistics and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He got into filmmaking, producing several short films and a full-length feature, the 2006 Brazilian film “Sonohos de Peixe,” shown at Cannes.

A few years later, he came back to Milwaukee to see his family. He had a new project in mind — a big-budget sci-fi thriller — and was looking for a writing partner.

A friend steered him to Austen, a Milwaukee playwright who had worked with several local theater companies as well as Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Their first meeting didn’t go well.

“We were kind of (dismissive) about each other,” he said.

“Completely, actually,” she added.

But Mikhanovsky went to a reading of one of Austen's plays; they met for coffee, began talking about his project, and found common ground. One thing they figured out was his sci-fi project would need a budget of about $45 million — a little too rich for their resources.

“We took a step back,” Mikhanovsky said. “ … That’s when we started thinking about a movie about Milwaukee.”

While the script they came up with drew from Mikhanovsky’s experience driving a medical transport van during his years at UWM, what became “Give Me Liberty” was really “inspired by Milwaukee.”

Specifically, Mikhanovsky said, Milwaukee is synonymous with the movie’s main theme.

“The movie reaffirms the resilience of the American dream. … (Milwaukee) is a city that’s reinventing itself,” Austen said.

As they put together the screenplay, Austen and Mikhanovsky made two non-negotiable decisions: to make Milwaukee a central character in the movie, and to work with as many non-actors as possible to make the story more authentic.

It turned out insisting on filming the movie in Milwaukee posed some of the filmmakers’ biggest challenges, particularly when it came to financing. Funding sources urged them to take the project to states with film tax credits and with a stronger film-finance infrastructure.

“(But) by taking the film anywhere else, it would have betrayed the idea of making the film,” Mikhanovsky said. “It’s an authentic American city. … It’s a working city.”

'Never about' differences

The filmmakers decided the city’s differences and divisions would be the movie’s strength. In their screenplay, the characters aren’t defined by disability or age or racial background. Those characteristics aren't ignored or turned into clichés; they're just people first.

“It was never about disabilities, it was never about segregation. … It was about humanity,” Austen said.

Looking for someone to play Tracy, Austen was connected by a casting director in Los Angeles with Spencer. Diagnosed with ALS at age 14, Spencer, now 32, often is billed as a “disability lifestyle influencer,” but she said she sees herself as a content creator (her YouTube channel, Sitting Pretty Lolo, has more than 11,000 subscribers, and nearly 18,000 followers on Instagram), model, actress and public speaker — all of whom are on a mission.

“Representation and inclusivity are my passion,” said Spencer, via phone from a fashion shoot in New York City. “Representation matters. When you see characters, you want to see yourself … especially when you’re marginalized.”

Spencer, Austen and Mikhanovsky talked about the movie and her role in it for two years before shooting actually began. That helped Spencer understand her character and the world the filmmakers were trying to create inside that van.

“When you’re in that van, everyone’s on an even playing field,” she said. “ … Everyone in that van is equal. … That’s what this story is about. That’s what America needs to be.”

When Mikhanovsky and Austen first began working on the movie, they sounded out the Eisenhower Center, the longtime vocational training and jobs center on the northwest side, and asked if they could film at the center.

Barbara Rowland, then the center's executive director, and JoAnne Kurkowski, program director, signed off on it because the movie fit with the center's mission, said David Ordan, Eisenhower Center CEO.

In the process, some of the center's clients play key roles in the movie. Steve Wolski plays a job applicant working with Tracy, and Gregory Merzlak's beautiful artwork is shown lovingly in several scenes, including one in which he's making it.

Mikhanovsky "really became part of the center," Ordan said.

Mikhanovsky and Austen also received a lot of support from the Wisconsin African American Women's Center, which provided the filmmakers space for everything from storing equipment to holding auditions at the center at 3020 W. Vliet St.

When they needed to find a house on the north side with a wheelchair ramp, one of the center's volunteers found one, said Josephine Hill, director of the WAAW Center.

"We're receptive to supporting community efforts and community needs," said Hill, who's looking forward to going to the Aug. 22 premiere at the Oriental.

'Building the car we were driving'

In 2017, with a cast lined up and script in hand, Austen and Mikhanovsky were approaching filming when they broke with their original producing partners on the project over several issues (Austen described it as “the wrong fit”). At that point, they might have walked away from the movie altogether.

“It was not an option for us,” Mikhanovsky said. “We would never have been able to look people in the eye.”

Making it easier to go ahead was the support they got — not only from cast and crew, but from local businesses that stepped in to provide food, hotel accommodations and other support.

“We had a lot of people who really gave their energy and goodwill to the film,” Mikhanovsky said.

Although the movie also received crucial financial support from the Milwaukee Film Festival in the form of a $30,000 Brico Forward Fund award, the filmmakers, cast and crew were still scrambling to piece together the rest of the budget even as they started shooting in late 2017.

"The remainder of the budget was assembled while we were shooting," Mikhanovsky said, describing it as "building the car we were driving."

That the movie was shot in a Milwaukee winter posed different challenges. In a nighttime scene in which a protest erupts into a mini-battle, Spencer’s character is knocked to the ground; when they shot it, it was 17 degrees outside.

“I had never in my life been around snow. I’d never been in cold,” said Spencer, adding she was very worried about the frigid temperatures' impact on her condition. But the wardrobe crew was “very, very creative,” sneaking in heating pads, snow boots and other sources of warmth that the camera couldn’t pick up.

But the result helped heighten the realism of the scene, and the movie.

"One person (at Sundance) said, 'This feels like a documentary,' " Spencer recalled. "That's one of my favorite things about the film."

After a "pretty wild cut" of "Give Me Liberty" was accepted at Sundance, the filmmakers had to scramble again — this time, to get the movie ready for festival audiences, and the movie-industry marketers that populate them.

"Every step of the way," Mikhanovsky said, they were told their low-budget, non-star-powered, filmed-in-Milwaukee comedy-drama was unproduceable and unmarketable.

"Every step of the way, we have to prove them wrong," he said.

After securing international distribution, the key was picking up a U.S. distributor — especially tough, Austen noted, since they were told by many companies "we don't know how to market it." Music Box, a Chicago-based distributor that specializes in independent and foreign films, picked up U.S. distribution rights for the movie in May.

Brian Andreotti, head of acquisitions at Music Box Films, first saw "Give Me Liberty" at Sundance "and was really taken with it."

"What struck me about 'Give Me Liberty' is how original and how bold it is," he said. " … It's about marginalized people in this city. … This is film is such a diverse portrait of America."

Which, Andreotti acknowledged, also means "there's no (targeted) audience to market it to." Word-of-mouth support for the movie from audiences will be key to the movie's success, he said.

"Give Me Liberty" is drawing continued local support; recently, the BrightStar Wisconsin Foundation invested $20,000 in "Give Me Liberty," the nonprofit's first investment in something other than a tech start-up.

It's another sign of what Milwaukee can do.

"There's the notion about Milwaukee that we don't pull together … ," Austen said. "This is an instance where the business community, the artistic community, the filmmaking community can pull together."

Now all "Give Me Liberty" has to do is become a hit.

“After all these battles, the biggest battle is now,” Mikhanovsky said.

Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.