Yasmin Mistry (she, her, hers) is an Emmy-nominated animator and filmmaker. Her work has been displayed worldwide, including showings at the United Nations and White House as well as at SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, and more. She is the recipient of grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Puffin Foundation, Riverside Sharing Fund, and Harnisch Foundation and was a two-time finalist for funding from the ITVS Diversity Development Fund. Films from her documentary shorts series about foster care have been featured in over 140 film festivals and nominated for more than 80 awards. In 2018, Mistry received the CASA Hero Award for her advocacy work, giving youth in the child welfare system an opportunity to be heard.

Project Statement

Together (working title) is a film about a Vietnamese-American woman’s efforts to reconcile her tumultuous childhood by exploring her family history. This journey leads to the discovery of two sisters, a legacy of childhood abuse, and a forced confrontation with the haunting question: “How do you heal when you don’t know the truth?” Blending personal interviews, verité footage, and animation, this feature-length documentary explores family separation and trauma while questioning the destructive notion that seeking help is a sign of weakness instead of a path to empowerment. These sisters’ stories weave a dynamic narrative, demanding changes to the ingrained social hierarchies which perpetuate intra-familial violence.

Kristian Mercado Figueroa (he, him, his) is a Puerto Rican filmmaker from Spanish Harlem. His psychedelic reggaeton short film, Nuevo Rico, won the Animation Jury Award at SXSW 2021, and in 2019 his short film/music video Pa’lante won a Jury Award at SXSW. In 2020 his screenplay Hawkbells won Slamdance’s Screenwriting Award. He has been the recipient of awards and grants from Cinereach (2020) and others. In 2020, Kris received official selection at SXSW 2020 for the Grammy-nominated Colors by Black Pumas and “Miami Nights Comedy Special” for Hannibal Buress. His work can be seen on Netflix, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, and more. He’s currently working with HBO and A24. Mercado’s distinct voice addresses issues of identity, family, and systemic oppression across race and class.

Project Statement

Mataron A Pedro (They Killed Pedro) is a narrative film about a Puerto Rican man attending Harvard and leading labor strikes against a white Chief of Police and white Governor in the early 1930s. The compelling moments in this story range from an epic sugar cane workers strike in the backdrop of a burning plantation field to a husband and father putting his life on the line to defend his people. The film explores the question: “For whom has democracy been crafted in America?” It explores the themes of class struggles, family, colonialism, and the justice system.

Photo by Matt Carey.

Dean Colin Marcial (he, him, his) is an international filmmaker working in New York and Manila. His award-winning films have been screened at Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Sitges Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, and Slamdance. Several of his shorts are Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week selections and featured on VICE, CNN, and Filmmaker Magazine. He co-founded Calavera USA in 2010. This Brooklyn-based production company’s credits include All That I Am (SXSW Special Jury Prize 2013, distributed by Gunpowder & Sky), Fishtail (Tribeca Film Festival 2014, distributed by Netflix), and Yearbook (Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize 2014 and 25+ awards, 125+ festivals). In 2017, he was a recipient of the Tribeca All Access Grant and Tribeca All Access Alumni Grant and shortlisted for the Russo Brothers Fellowship.

Project Statement

Green Gorillas chronicles the rise and fall of an impassioned eco-terrorist group over an explosive decade in the Philippines. When they were young, they were reckless—and when they grow up, they face off.  Jess, Eddie, and Emilia were best friends, a love triangle, and the leaders of an environmental action group who called themselves the Green Gorillas. They staged protests and demonstrations by day--and by night, they organized tree-spiking, tree-sitting, and sabotage. At the heart of the film are visionaries whose ideals collide. Their emotions and history run deep. Three people, who long to be together, but keep themselves unrequited. In Tagalog this is called “hugot”—a deeply-felt aching inside your bones and body, a wistful longing for something that may never be.

As a descendant of immigrants displaced by conflict, Eunice Lau (she, her, hers) is drawn to stories about the journey of the immigrant and the profundity of hyphenated identities. It’s this inheritance that makes her cognizant of injustice and makes her storytelling personal. Her feature documentary Accept the Call, set in Minnesota’s Somali community, explores the impact of injustice and intergenerational trauma. It aired on PBS’ Independent Lens after screening at acclaimed film festivals. Her work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, Woodstock Film Festival, ITVS, Chicken & Egg Pictures, North Point Institute, and YouTube Impact Lab. A Masters of Fine Arts in film graduate from NYU, Lau was born and raised in Singapore and now lives in Queens on Lenape land.

Project Statement

Son of the Soil is a documentary film about the exigency of our ecocide told through the story of David Buckel, a lawyer-turned-environmentalist who set himself on fire in the name of climate change. Once celebrated for being a public defender of LGBTQ rights and for creating America’s largest hand-powered compost sites, David’s suicide captures the trauma and impact of climate change on our psyche. By documenting David’s journey as he struggled against the political expedient defunding of his cherished compost site, Lau’s documentary reveals how our profit-driven economy compels politicians to pay lip service to the climate movement. The film is also a love story to the world, capturing the zeal of his protégé Domingo Morales as he expands composting across public housing in NYC.

Photo by Wong Maye-E.

Nadav Kurtz (he, him, his) is an Israeli/Japanese/American filmmaker and editor born in Israel and raised in Europe and the United States. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, Sheffield Doc Fest and more, and has been showcased by the Criterion Channel, POV, and the New York Times’ Op-Docs. His directorial debut, Paraíso, won Best Documentary Short at multiple international festivals and was short-listed for an Academy Award. His direction of 35 short accounts of immigration won him three Gold Pencil awards at The One Show. Kurtz was named in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and was a Points North Fellow at the 2021 Camden International Film Festival. He is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.

Project Statement

When Omar was six years old, his father Sam produced Street Thief—a fictional feature film about a burglar. Only weeks before the film’s premiere, Sam was arrested for an armed robbery and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Now twenty-two, Omar struggles under the weight of his father’s long absence, while Sam, still incarcerated, hopes to reach Omar through a creative collaboration on a screenplay. Through Kurtz’s intimate relationship with Omar’s family—whom he met while editing Street Thief—this hybrid documentary draws on a wealth of personal archival, behind-the-scenes footage, and 16mm dailies from the film Sam produced before his arrest. It follows Omar’s coming of age as he seeks freedom from his past, reckoning and reconciling on the way to healing his relationship with his father.

Photo by Nolis Anderson.

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich (she, her, hers) is a filmmaker and artist who has presented projects in Kingston, Jamaica, Miami, Florida, and extensively in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work has screened at the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and at the New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa, and Blackstar Film Festivals. She has been featured in Essence Magazine, Studio Museum’s Studio Magazine, ARC Magazine, BOMBLOG, Guernica Magazine, and Small Axe journal, among others. She was named in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and is the recipient of a 2020 San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO fellowship, a 2015 TFI ESPN Future Filmmaker Award and a 2014 Princess Grace Award.

Project Statement

Madame Negritude is the true story of Suzanne Roussi Césaire, the rebellious Martiniquan writer and wife of the Caribbean poet and politician Aimé Césaire. The Césaires were formative members of the group of writers, artists, and philosophers involved in the black power Négritude movement. The couple and their contemporaries led the rejection of colonialism and the rise of African and Caribbean independence movements. Negritude made an impact on how the black people viewed themselves. For fifty years, the impact of writer and activist Suzanne Césaire on influential works of art and political movements has been overshadowed by the political stardom of her husband. This film will break the silence about the important contributions of Suzanne Césaire’s life and work.

Travis Gutiérrez Senger (he, him, his) is a Mexican-American director, writer, and producer. His debut feature, Desert Cathedral, starring Lee Tergesen and Chaske Spencer, was released in 2016. His documentary short, White Lines and the Fever, about legendary Puerto Rican deejay Junebug, won awards at the Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW in 2010. He is currently directing ASCO: Without Permission, a feature documentary about the avant-garde art collective ASCO, executive produced by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna.

Project Statement

ASCO: Without Permission profiles the extraordinary an East Los Angeles based Chicano artist collective, active from 1972 to 1987. ASCO merged art and activism and challenged Latinx representation in the art world, politics, and Hollywood through their incendiary performance art, photography, video, and muralism. ASCO: Without Permission examines the importance of their subversive and wildly spirited work and how it serves as a framework for Latinx representation in today’s cultural landscape. Through formal invention and the creation of original works with the next generation of artists, along with ASCO’s incredible archive and interviews, the documentary provides a call to action while celebrating a group that was far ahead of its time.

Adrian Garcia Gomez (he, him, his) is an interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, photography, and illustration. His artwork, which is largely autobiographical and often performative, explores the intersections of race, immigration, gender, spirituality, and sexuality. His films have screened at festivals around the world and at cultural institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, LA Filmforum and the Roxie Theater, San Francisco. His videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and Collectif Jeune Cinéma. He studied photography and non-western art history in San Francisco, 16mm filmmaking in Mexico City, and video in New York City. Gomez migrated to California from Mexico with his mother when she was six months pregnant with him. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Project Statement

Las Catas is an experimental animation exploring femininity and the gender binary through a queer Latinx lens. The video, structured around a speculative meeting between the filmmaker and astrologer Walter Mercado, weaves together original and appropriated footage to create short vignettes in order to bring to light our complex relationship with gender and the rich realities and possibilities that have always existed within our culture.

Sarah Friedland (she, her, hers) is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Her work has been screened, installed, and performed across film, art, and dance venues including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Performa19 Biennial, Sharjah Art Foundation, the American Dance Festival, and Mubi, among many others. She is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video and a Pina Bausch Fellow for Dance and Choreography.

Project Statement

A coming of (old) age film, Familiar Touch follows an octogenarian woman’s transition to life in an assisted living facility as she contends with her own desires and conflicting self-narratives amidst her cognitive impairment. The protagonist Ruth experiences herself primarily as a twenty-something woman, without losing the selves and experiences of her sixty intervening years. A feature-length narrative film, Familiar Touch centers the embodiment and physical experiences of the elder facility’s residents and staff, reflecting and challenging our socio-cultural mores regarding aging (ageism) and independence, the work of caregivers, and collective living.

Photo by Matteo Bellomo.

Suha Araj (she, her, hers) creates films that explore the displacement of immigrant communities. The Cup Reader, a comedy shot in Palestine about a fortune teller and her matchmaking abilities, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Next Great Filmmaker Award at the Berkshire International Film Festival and Baghdad International Film Festival. Araj has received support for her work from the Sundance Film Festival, Torino Film Lab, Independent Filmmaker Project, Berlinale Talent Project Market, Center for Asian American Media and Cine Qua Non Lab. She is the 2018 recipient of Tribeca/Chanel Through Her Lens production funding for her film Rosa, which tells the story of a woman who begins a business to ship undocumented immigrants to their home countries for burial. The film won the Best Short Narrative Award and the Lionsgate/STARZ Short Film Award at BlackStar Film Festival, and the Best Short Narrative Award at the Woodstock Film Festival. She is a 2021 Creative Capital Grantee for her feature film Khsara (Pickled) and a Warner Media 150 Fellow for her feature comedy/thriller, Bowling Green Massacre.

Project Statement

Khsara (Pickled) is a feature-length comedy film set in the Palestinian diaspora about women who don’t get married “in time.” Nearing the ripe age of 30, astrophysicist Nisreen will expire if not wed. She struggles to find her own path between her old-world Palestinian roots and the modern reality in which she lives, while her global family actively interferes, for better or worse. This film shows what happens when a Palestinian-American discovers that love is more important than marriage.

Photo by Kris Rumman.