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If you want to make a movie, you generally need a lot of money. And filmmakers have to be creative about raising it.

Just ask the filmmakers at the Sundance Film Festival, taking place this week in Park City, Utah. Some 10 percent of the films selected for this year's iteration of the prestigious festival raised money through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.

In the three years since the website launched, Kickstarter-funded films have been nominated for Oscars, picked up by Showtime and HBO, and honored with awards at Sundance, South By Southwest and Cannes.

Svetlana Anikeeva was 15 in the early '90s when she visited America as an exchange student.

"And it was completely different place in every imaginable aspect," she recalls.

Anikeeva grew up in Vladivostok on the eastern edge of Russia, and studied abroad in Savannah, Ga., where the experience, she says, changed her life.

"The people were different. The culture was different. The weather, the food, the school. Everything was fascinating," she says. "I knew that I wanted to come here."

Gareth Morgan hasn't said he's a dog person, but he's definitely not a cat person. Morgan, a top New Zealand economist and environmentalist, is campaigning for a cat-free country.

In an interview with The New York Times, Morgan said "cats are a 'friendly neighborhood serial killer' of birds."

In his first TV interview, Manti Te'o told Katie Couric Thursday that what he "went through was real."

The Notre Dame linebacker, whose athleticism and tragic personal story buoyed him to stardom, has been in the spotlight ever since DeadSpin revealed part of that amazing story wasn't real.

Update at 9:25 ET Senate OKs Filibuster Deal

The Senate voted Thursday to limit filibusters in a rare bipartisan vote that would reduce but not end the number of times opponents can use the procedure.

Here's more from The Associated Press: