“He thought, ‘I may as well make a movie about it, because I hadn’t seen anything that I trusted about this emerging community and nothing related to what I was feeling about it.’”

DAN SICKLES IS AN AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM DIRECTOR, WRITER, ACTOR, AND PRODUCER. HE IS BEST KNOWN FOR MALA MALA, AN ICONIC DOCUMENTARY RELEASED THEATRICALLY IN 2015, AND DINA, WINNER OF THE GRAND JURY PRIZE AT THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL IN 2017. AN INCREDIBLE TALENT!

Dan’s parents took him to the theater as a child. He studied drama and graduated from New York University. Visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art instilled in him a love of art.

Flash forward to what Dan is currently working on: the Media3 film, ‘I’m New Here,’ a documentary and NFT collection capturing the transformative power of cryptoart. “It’s about the culture of crypto; that motivation to create and make art. What is art, why does it exist, and why is it so effective? It’s the history of minting on blockchain as well as interoperability.”

Dan had bought some Bitcoin in 2017. When it imploded in 2018, he “stopped paying attention just like everyone else.” But when he saw the mainstream press started talking about NFTs, he thought he’d give them a shot, tracking Kidmograph when he dropped on Nifty Gateway. The money that Dan had earned from a “shitty experience” in filmmaking gave him the opportunity to grab crypto and get involved in communities in a very committed way.

And then Dan felt that as he was going to spend a lot of time in the space, he thought, “I may as well make a movie about it because I hadn’t seen anything that I trusted about this emerging community and nothing related to what I was feeling about it.’” Returning from a trip abroad, Dan and his wife found their apartment in New York had been robbed. While the police were dusting for fingerprints, Dan hopped onto Discord and shouted out, “I got robbed but my CryptoBabyPunk is safe!” One of the people on that chat sent Dan a case of Kombucha. “The internet had never worked for me like that before.”

Dan says of the project, “Part of our responsibility is to give the space dignity- to film the brilliant minds of this movement professionally. The people we speak to are artists, craftspeople, and developers that do really important work.” 15% of the NFT revenue will go directly to the artists included in the drop, in perpetuity. Now that’s filmmaking!