Scores of nuns are getting into the film-financing business — sort of.
Mary Fishman, the producer and director of “Band of Sisters,” a documentary about 1960s-era nuns and their fight for social justice, got a sizeable chunk of her $120,000 budget from that very unlikely source.
While certain not to give Kickstarter any real competition, the nuns — from different groups across the country — ponied up the cash, Fishman said, because they liked the film’s focus.
“I got tired of the ‘stern old nun’ image the media perpetuates that gives these women a bad rap,” Fishman said last week when asked why she picked nuns as the subject for her film.
Some donations, not surprisingly, were for as little as $5 and $10, Fishman said.
Other nuns wrote checks for several hundred dollars — with a few congregations giving a couple of thousand bucks.
Including grants, Fishman’s grass-roots efforts secured the $120,000 through her DIY strategy, which included house parties and several e-mail fundraising campaigns.
Fishman also kicked in some of her own money.
To date, “Band of Sisters,” completed in 2012, has played theatrically in 30 US cities.
Fishman, before the film opens in a city, contacts parishes, progressive Catholic groups, religious orders and individual nuns — many of whom spread the word on their Facebook pages and websites.
“We’ve screened several movies featuring nuns in the Athena Film Festival, and featured ‘Band of Sisters’ last year,” said Athena artistic director Melissa Silverstein, who is also founder and editor of the Women and Hollywood blog on Indiewire.com.
“We loved how these films challenge the church to enter the 21st century,” she added.
The film opens Friday at Cinema Village on East 12th Street.