Yes. Oscar winner "Once" was shot with DV and a budget of ~€150,000. Its box office was ~$20,710,513. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Original Song
Did you solve your problem? Since you have a PhD, likely you may also be able to go through EB-1A, or EB-1B. Would happy to offline with you to share my experience on EB-1A.
Thanks for engaging in the conversation with us here!
I think my story is not a horror one, instead I am luck to be able to go through the EB-1A (Extraordinary Ability green card) path.
I started 3 companies in China, worked in Europe (Ireland) for a few year and then move to US to work for Microsoft Research. I tried several different path in order to get a visa status do my new startup, and found it's nearly impossible. It's a chicken and egg problem: you need a visa for yourself to be able to work legally for your startup, but it's nearly impossible to get yourself a working visa for a startup without enough capital, it's also nearly impossible to get funded if you don't even have a legal status to work full time for your startup... it's basically a dead loop. Our project as a moonlight side project got traction, got users, got reported in major US news (USA Today, ABC, CNN...) but sadly those only made my life tougher since I was in the risk of losing my job which keep my visa status -- which means my whole family will have to go back to the home country within a few days.
Fortunately I found EB-1A was a potential path and I went through it successfully, and I am now full time on my startup. But it's no fun at all to spend all the time in preparing immigration papers works instead of working on your startups when the momentum was there. Many of my friends find it's so entertaining to see my GC documents looks like, here is just a half part of it: http://discoverful.com/photo/30461/
Even though I went through this EB-1A process, I was just lucky that I did a lot of other stuff (published papers, got media reports, received awards, played critical roles etc.) which made me qualify for those EB1A criteria.
I would like to share my stories to help improve the US immigration system, to allow more entrepreneurs like myself to be able to have freedom to innovate and start new business here in US. The United States is build on entrepreneurship, let's make it better for entrepreneurs.