The film centers on the story of Michelle Baldwin, a 45-year-old woman who was diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer and told she had just a matter of months to live. Her response was to travel to India and paddleboard 700 miles down the Ganges River in an effort to expand awareness of cervical cancer and the human papilloma virus that causes it and other types of cancer, including cancers in men.

“Most people when they find out they’re terminal, they hole up and wait to die,” Hefti said by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “She kind of did the opposite.”

Hefti and Lumiere originally considered Baldwin for the documentary they released last year, “Someone You Love,” which aimed to shed light on HPV and cervical cancer. But they decided her story was too big and needed to be told in a film on its own.

“Someone You Love” has many emotional elements to it as it tells the stories of five women whose lives were turned upside down or prematurely ended by cervical cancer. But it also emphasizes education about HPV and cervical cancer and the HPV vaccine.

“’Lady Ganga’ is going to be different. We have a lot more freedom to get creative with it. It’ll be more about inspiring and less about facts,” said Hefti, who is writing and co-producing with Lumiere, who serves as the film’s director. “We’re hoping that it’ll be in contention for an Oscar. That’s the goal.”

Actually, the even bigger goal is to save lives. The plan is to have “Lady Ganga” translated into 50 languages so people around the globe will get the message that cervical cancer is preventable through the HPV vaccine and that

After the Kickstarter campaign more than tripled their original goal of raising $50,000, Hefti and Lumiere traveled to India in May to get more footage for the documentary with Baldwin’s daughter, Audrey, who was 12 when her mother died. They also brought a six-minute version of “Lady Ganga” to show in a small village in Ladahk, a small, mountainous country north of India between Pakistan and China, in hopes of convincing some women to take part in a women’s health clinic in a nearby village.

They had the short video dubbed in the native language of Ladakh (which only about 150,000 people speak). The plan was to show the video and do some additional filming for the feature-length version of “Lady Ganga,” with the footage showing the life-saving impact Baldwin was having, even after her death.

When Hefti and Lumiere first got to Ladakh, they stayed with a family in a bigger town. A boy from the small village that also was staying with the family while he went to school so impressed Hefti and Lumiere that they decided they would focus their video shoot on his mother, Nilza.

It turned out to be a stroke of good luck, both for the filmmakers and for Nilza. As shown in the recently released short video, “Lady Ganga: Nilza’s Story,” Nilza and an unexpectedly large group of women from the village got on the chartered bus to the clinic with Hefti and Lumiere. At the clinic, the doctor found and removed a pre-cancerous lesion on Nilza’s cervix. Left undetected and unremoved, it likely would have turned into a cancer that likely would have claimed her life.

“We had no idea going into it if she had anything wrong with her. We just had to commit to somebody,” Hefti said. “It was pretty amazing. It was just one of those things where it all came together. … We couldn’t believe that the woman we happened to choose to follow really needed the procedure.”

The experience with Nilza has Lumiere and Hefti rethinking the “Lady Ganga” project. Rather than focusing almost entirely on Baldwin, they plan to devote more of the documentary to showing the ripple effects that Baldwin’s life and death have had.

“Lady Ganga: Nilza’s Story” features powerful music by Lisbeth Scott, a well-known composer of music for cinema. Hefti said she agreed to let them use some of her already recorded work for the short documentary, and Hefti and Lumiere hope to raise enough money to have her write an original score for “Lady Ganga.”

“So many people have been so giving with their time and financially,” Hefti said. “It’s amazing.”

The experience of going to India and Ladakh also was amazing for Hefti, who celebrated his 40th birthday in Ladakh with a nine-piece traditional band and “55 of the best friends I’d never met before.”

While there were some logistical issues, filming on the trip was a breeze because of the natural scenic beauty. “Anywhere we pointed the camera, it was just beautiful,” Hefti said. “You couldn’t have a bad shot anywhere there.”

Hefti has done a lot of documentary work with Lumiere before, and he’s also done quite a bit of feature film writing, starring in a movie he wrote himself, “Tomorrow is Today,” playing a homeless, alcoholic former Major League pitcher who is pulled back from the brink by a young woman played by Scout Taylor-Compton.

This year, Hefti started a production company, Green Ray Entertainment, with co-founder Serah Morrissey. One project in the works, “The Blue Torch,” centers on an entertainer who portrays a superhero at children’s parties who has to become a real-life hero after a child is kidnapped from a party. The company also bought the film rights this year to a board game, Spy Alley, and Hefti has recently been working on two feature film scripts, one an original story for an action movie that has two major stars involved and one an adaptation of a literary classic.

“For me, I like to have different projects in all different areas,” Hefti said. “It keeps me creative.”

While Hefti is plenty enthusiastic about his feature film work, his involvement in “Someone You Love” and “Lady Ganga” has been life-changing for him and potentially life-saving for tens of thousands of people around the world every year.

Three years ago, Hefti said he couldn’t have spoken for more than five minutes about cervical cancer and HPV. In the interim he’s learned so much about HPV that he sounds like an expert, rattling off HPV-related statistics and cancer facts.

He points out, for example, that HPV is not only a female issue. Men, he said, are three times more likely to get oral cancer then women, and 60 percent of oral cancers are traced to HPV infections. For example, Hefti said, the throat cancer that movie star Michael Douglas was treated for was HPV-related.

He also noted that cervical cancer is a much bigger problem for women in the developing world. The annual death toll from cervical cancer in the United States is 4,000, while in India about 75,000 women die from cervical cancer every year. Judging from the experience Hefti had in Ladakh with Nilza, getting “Lady Ganga” dubbed into 50 languages could make a real dent in HPV-related issues around the world.

“I’m excited about ‘Lady Ganga’ and where it’s going,” Hefti said. “People who are in the field in oncology and gynecology have been waiting for something like this. Nobody has really done anything like this. It’s really something that affects everybody.”