FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 22, 2010
(Boston, Massachusetts)
Contact: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan (781) 729-6204

CONTROVERSY FILMS AWARDED SHAKESPEARE FELLOWSHIP FOUNDATION GRANT

Controversy Films director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan has been awarded a grant from the Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation to support the production of her new feature length film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name.
The other 2010 grant recipients are the Shakespeare Authorship Research Center at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, The Shakespeare Authorship Conference, and The Shakespeare Oxford Society.

The Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation was created in 2002 through the generosity of Roland Caldwell of Caldwell Trust Company in Florida. The primary goal of this trust was to financially support research and other efforts toward the objective of “establishing once and for all the author of the enormous literary works known to the world as ‘Shakespeare’”.

Nothing is Truer than Truth looks at the process of writing, where life experience, imitation of the masters, and relentless revision come together to create genius, as the key to discovering Edward de Vere as the true author of the works attributed to William
Shakespeare. The film focuses on the sixteen-month period when Edward de Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent from his home base in Venice, gathering the material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare. Material filmed to date includes interviews with many scholars and actors on the subject of Shakespeare and the authorship controversy, including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance.

This year’s production schedule for Controversy Films includes an interview with scholar Richard Paul Roe, author of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Then and Now next month in Pasadena, documenting the Shakespeare Authorship Conference in Ashland, Oregon in September, and filming on location in Venice. In November, Eagan-
Donovan opened the Annual Shakespeare Authorship Conference in Houston with her lecture on Oxford as Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century and screened the trailer for her film.

Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a documentary filmmaker, whose debut feature All Kindsa Girls screened at film festivals in London, Toronto and throughout the U.S., is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV.
The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. Eagan-Donovan serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofits Women in Film & Video New England and The Next Door Theater in Winchester, MA. She studied Shakespeare and wrote poetry as a literature major at Goddard College, earned a BA in Finance &
Business Administration at Boston University, and is currently an MFA candidate at Lesley University. She has published articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film, in literary journals and magazines.

The film’s trailer can be viewed at: www.avpresentations.com/controversy/.