Past
Grantees

XAVIER MARRADES ORGA received $14,000 for TRANS TIME, a personal reflection of the filmmakers seven years in New York City. According to Orga, New York is a place that shaped his development as a person and artist and his entry into adulthood. He arrived in the city in his early twenties. It was the fulfillment of his teenage dream to move to New York, not only to realize his artistic ambitions, but also to nurture his developing sexuality as a gay man. The chance to leave behind the otherness that enveloped so much of his pre-New York years had finally arrived. He would also finally have a real chance to connect with others. What happened in the ensuing seven years was a rite of passage, moments of lost innocence, gains in maturity, brushes with mortality. This film is an open search and meditation about personal change in the transitional city of excellence. It will unfold as a trip through time, which Marrades Orga looks within himself and travels on a journey of discovery through others.

Ruth peyser received $15,000 for I Am Here Its Me Can You See, an animated and live-action film that explores the effect of chronic illness on our lives. This is a very personal project for Peyser in that it explores the theme of chronic illness through the stories of two women who are close to her: her Aunt Laura, whom she knew as a young child, and Pam, a close friend she has known most of her adult life. Both women were struck and inalterably changed by Parkinsons Disease. Peyser will explore their stories in different ways her aunt through animated sequences as seen through the eyes of a child, and her friend Pam through live-action footage featuring, among other things, interviews of Pam and her children. Peyser hopes that these stories will impart a thought-provoking journey, exposing in a touching and compassionate way the qualities that make us human.

YORUBA RICHEN was awarded support for a feature-length documentary, The New Black (working title), which uncovers the complicated and often combative histories and intersections of the African-American and LGBT civil rights movements. Specifically, the film examines homophobia in the black communitys institutional pillar the black church, and reveals the Christian right wings strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in pursuit of an anti-gay political agenda. The New Black goes from New York to Washington, D.C. to California to document the stories of the gay gospel singer Tonex, and Sharon Lettman, the head of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), who are challenging homophobia in the black church and confronting traditionally white gay organizations around issues of race. The film also follows Bishop Harry Jackson, one of the leading anti-gay black ministers as he fights efforts to advance gay rights. Through these stories and other secondary characters, the film reveals a political alliance between members of the black church and the Christian right that has shaped the fight for gay rights over the last 20 years.

JOSHUA SANCHEZ received a grant for a feature-length narrative called Four. Written by Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Christopher Shinn, the film juxtaposes the relationships of two couples struggling with their desires and demons on one Fourth of July evening. Theres Joe, a seemingly straight, middle-aged black man who carries on a closeted gay relationship with a white teenager named June. And theres Abigayle, a suburban, African-American teenage girl, and coincidentally the daughter of Joe, who is courted by a white teenage boy named Dexter. Dexter has designs of luring Abigayle into the bedroom, and although Abigayle knows she should resist him, she succumbs. As these four individuals move from strangers to intimates, their tolerance and acceptance of each other break down. When Joe returns home the morning after a night with June, he and Abigayle are forced to confront Joes secret and its impact on their relationship.

CARRIE SCHNEIDER received $9,000 for an experimental film called Burning House.

Carrie Schneider received $9,000 for her experimental film Burning House (2011–2015). Shot over the course of two and half years, Schneider built fifteen identical wooden houses (measuring 8 x 6 x 8 feet) on an island in the middle of a lake in rural Wisconsin and burned each house down, all while filming from the same vantage point on land. The original score was composed and performed by Cecilia Lopez, using electrified sheets of scrap metal.


About the Artist

Carrie Schneider is a visual artist working in photography and film. Her screenings and exhibitions include the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Kitchen, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ArtForum, VICE, Modern Painters, and The New Yorker. She received a Creative Capital Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, and is currently faculty at Pratt Institute and the International Center of Photography/Bard’s MFA Program. Carrie is based in Brooklyn, New York.

http://carrieschneider.net

JAY STERN received $10,000 for The Adventures of Paul and Marian, a romantic musical comedy about two young lovers struggling to find a way to stay together. Its also about capitalists and revolutionaries, growing up, and finding, losing, and then re-finding lost love. Paul and Marian have eloped against Marians fathers wishes. Hiding out at Pauls uncles book depository deep in the woods, Paul quickly realizes he cant support Marians opulent lifestyle, so he heads out into the world to make his fortune while Marian waits for him. Stranded at the book depository, Marian starts reading, and fired up by revolutionary fervor she decides to change the world. But her father, a corporate giant known as The General, hasnt changed at all in fact, hes sent two goons to hunt for his daughter, and theyre closing in fast. Meanwhile in the Big City, Paul discovers that he has a hidden business acumen and a taste for the rat race while Marian continues to find her calling and remains determined to bring about violent revolution. When Paul and Marian meet again, it will be in the company of corporate henchmen, mad bombers and lots of singing and dancing. How can their love survive?

JACOB SWANSON (Duluth, Minnesota) received $15,000 for A Walk Amongst The Living (working title) a 60-minute experimental narrative about the schism between the institutions we commit to and our personal desires. According to filmmaker Swanson, work, family, marriage, friendship and religion are institutions that imprison us in our daily lives. As an aspiring filmmaker, he struggles everyday with his commitment to these institutions. The protagonist in this story is an unnamed woman who is weighed down by her day-to-day routines. She is killed in a car accident and wakes in an afterlife on an abandoned road. She is confronted with the choice of going back on the road the world of the living or travel down the road into the unknown. Unable to make a choice, she walks into a nearby forest. The woods act as a gateway to observing scenes played out by the people she was close to in life. She watches her husband make love to another woman, her parents walking on a beach, her best friend smoking on the culvert where they played growing up. After watching and at times interacting with those amongst the living, she makes the decision to walk into the unknown rather than return to her former life.

KAO LEE THAO received $20,000 for GAO ZOUA PA, a 15-minute animated short, which the filmmaker describes as the first 3D animated Hmong short ever created. It will capture an age-old Hmong folktale that has been verbally passed down through generations of Hmong people. The film follows one if its two primary characters, Orphan Boy, as he overcomes the taboo of having no parents while trying to create a life for himself. He encounters mythical people and creatures that guide him to his true love, a young woman named Gao Zoua Pa. After he turns his back on her love, she is lost to the dragon in a lake, who holds her captive. Orphan Boy must complete 3 tasks that test his character and courage in order to win back her love.

BRENNAN VANCE received $8,000 for Like Father, a 30-minute experimental documentary about memory, inheritance and the attempt at reconciliation between the filmmaker and his estranged father, who now suffers from early-onset dementia. The important thing is to remember this while we are still alive in order to live urgently, vibrantly, meaningfully. Like Father examines how the dualities of living and dying, remembering and forgetting, loving and losing manifest in possibly the most bewildering duality of all: father and son. Through the intimate exploration of Brennans fathers battle with dementia, and his own potentially grave genetic relationship with it, Like Father will use a dysfunctional father-son relationship to illuminate the human side of a disease which affects so many and calls our attention to lifes most important and precious possessions: mind and memory, identity and self-awareness, life and death.

JOSHUA WEINSTEIN received $18,000 for Off Duty, a feature length documentary that reveals the gritty life of New York City taxi drivers during the current economic downturn. At the center of the film is Eric Ying, a recent immigrant from China, who is struggling to reinvent himself as a cabbie. Like many Americans today, Eric Ying is unemployed and dreams of running his own business. With a wife and two young sons to support, he turns to a seemingly simple job: driving a taxicab. But it is a Herculean task for someone who can barely speak his customers language as well as navigate the citys 6,174 miles of streets. Off Duty exposes a conflicted version of capitalism, one in which a person will do anything to help feed his family, even at the expense of others, something that is never more apparent than on the roads of New York City. The film also observes the garage fraternity of cab drivers, which offers a rare place of community in a world of insecurities.

BRITNI WEST received $20,000 for Tired Moonlight, a feature-length narrative.  This film tells the story of lonely, middle-aged Dawn. Combustible dreams fail to ignite as she is confronted by lost love in a glorified-pit-stop town. Every town has a post office, lovers, guns, switchblades and beer. You just have to know where to look and when to look the other way. Pitting grand landscapes against dinners of fried chicken and the roar of V8 engines on Saturday nights, Tired Moonlight wanders through Solitaire games (always won), secrets lost in cavernous hearts, and the fifty miles of bad road that always gets you home. 

A grant was awarded to MATT WOLF in support of an experimental documentary titled Arthur Russell Video EP, about the life and visionary music of avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. When Arthur Russell ran away from Oskaloosa, Iowa as a teenager, he made his way to a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. By 1973 the twenty-two year old had moved to New York, where future collaborator Allen Ginsberg fortuitously became his next-door neighbor. Soon Arthur met Tom Lee, and the two became longtime boyfriends. Shortly after arriving in the East Village, Russell discovered the Gallery, an underground disco, where he met the influential DJ Nicky Siano. Arthur went on to produce some of the most vanguard disco hits of the era. At this time, Russell also produced luminous works for solo voice and cello. These breathy revelations fell somewhere between the liminal spaces of downtown New York and Iowa cornfields. Arthur died of AIDS in 1992. In the approximate length of an EP record, a series of video tracks, like chapters, will feature an array of materials illuminating Russells life and work. Each track can play individually like an experimental music video. But in combination, these chapters will form and extraordinary portrait.

A grant was awarded to REUBEN ATLAS for The Brothers Hypnotic, a feature-length documentary about an all-brass band of brothers from the South Side of Chicago. Brotherhood has long been a guiding ideal in the African American community. For the eight young men who make up the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, brotherhood has the dual significance of family ties and racial solidarity. Theyre all sons of Phil Cochran, a legendary Chicago trumpeter who turned his back on commercial music to pursue astral jazz (with Sun Ra), proto-funk, and Black Power. What was Cochrans ultimate avant-garde experiment? His own sons. They lived an insular communal existence with Cochran and their two mothers Mama Maia and Mama Aquilla complete with homemade clothes, veganism, and invented holidays. Starting at age three and continuing well into adulthood, the boys performed in the family band and were developed as artists and complex human beings under the ever-watchful eye of their determined father.

Support was awarded to SIGNE BAUMANE for A Guide to Survival, an animated feature that explores the link between the filmmakers bouts with depression and the depression of her Latvian grandmother, Anna. Where does depression come from? Does it live in a far away country and once in a while come to bestow its evil gifts? Or does it live near its sufferer, or actually inside its sufferer and, like a puppet master with strings attached to the limbs, jerk its sufferer around in a mad, painful dance? A Guide to Survival is a film about the depression and mental illness running in the family of the filmmaker. The story explores her familys history along with Latvias tragic place in two world wars. It also shows how historic events collided with the lives of individual people, forcing them to make difficult choices. The films story connects the past with the present through the filmmakers present day struggles with her inner demons in New York City, and her grandmothers struggles of the past in Latvia. The filmmaker will attempt to answer the question, Can you beat the genes?

A grant was awarded to KEITH BEARDEN for God Hates Kansas, an experimental feature-length narrative that was inspired by Katsuhito Ishiis neo-surrealist drama Cha no Aji. This is the story of an average American family living in small-town Kansas: Mom, twice divorced, out of shape, over-medicated and over-worried, tries to eradicate her normal fears and problems until she becomes the perfect woman of her dreams. Eloise, a shy nine-year-old, precociously fixates on finding true love and the perfect marriage her Mom never had. Dylan, the 22-year-old slacker son who is still at home, has rock star dreams that are five times bigger than his talent or ambition. Uncle John, a regular small town, church-going guy has a big secret: hes gay, and at almost 50, has lost a lot of time in coming to terms with his true self. God Hates Kansas is neither anti-God, nor anti-Kansas. It is a film about how there is great beauty in simple dreams, and the persons we want to be, and lives we want to.

PATRICIA BENOIT received support for Ayiti, Ayiti, a feature-length narrative that examines the social and intimate landscapes of exile through three intersecting storylines. Driven from Haiti to New York, Vita, Yannick and Max struggle to adjust to life in a new land. Vita reunites with her husband and tries to forget a history of assault; Yannick arrives at her sisters in Long Island, unwilling to buy into her sisters American dream; and Max shows up at the doorstep of his estranged son, who spends his days fighting everything his father represents. A final scene of reckoning brings the three together, face to face with the inescapable truths of their past. Through suspense, humor, and drama, Ayiti, Ayiti explores the personal fallout of political bloodshed, and the possibility of love, hope and endurance in a time of violence. The film presents what Benoit describes as an honest, complex portrayal of the diverse lives often ignored in the rush towards sensational headlines and shocking news footage of Haiti. This is Benoits debut as a feature-filmmaker. In addition to directing the work, she is also its writer.

RAQUEL CEPEDA received support for SOME GIRLS, a feature-length documentary that follows a group of troubled Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, told from the director Raquel Cepeda's viewpoint, the white supremacist narratives about American history they've been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. What does it really mean to be American? And, more importantly, what does that look like in today's socio-political and cultural landscape?

MICHAEL JOSEPH ETOLL, West St. Paul, received a grant for Pilgrimage to the Grave of Tiny Tim, a super-8 experimental narrative color film that will include live action and stop-action animation. Etoll intends to construct a world where delusional behavior is normal. The central characters will fight to express desires that they believe will help them break free from the insane tomb of torment that encases them as they walk to the Lakewood Cemetery to visit the grave of musician Tiny Tim (who was a Lebanese-American). During the journey, they meet a talking camel (a large puppet), and others who join them on the trip to the grave. Upon arriving at their destination, a type of second-rate enlightenment will occur: a false experience that allows them to settle back into their state of delusion with deep satisfaction. Most of the characters in the film will resemble Tiny Tim. Portions of the narration will be in Arabic. The film will be a moving painting with loud noises and shocking music interjected at key points to snap the viewer back into reality. This reality, in turn, is based on the vision of the deranged souls who populate the film.

JAMES GRAFSGAARD, Minneapolis, received support for Midas Rat and ME, an experimental narrative animated film written by the filmmakers son, James T. Grafsgaard, in the year 2000 at the age of 20, just as he was facing the choices and challenges of fitting in or fitting out of the system of institutions called the American Way of Life. Several lines of narration in the film best exemplify its theme: Most people thought we were for all out murderous anarchy. What we really wanted was just a peaceful place where there are no laws. Everyone gets along, but there are no PIGS to push you around. So explains the young woman (known only as ME) who narrates this real world tale of Midwestern alienation and love, which brings her and companion Midas Rat to the Twin Cities. She tells a touchingly authentic story of longing and loss in the context of Minnesotas anarchist punk subculture, giving this work a unique aesthetic and emotional impact.

CRISTINA IBARRA was awarded a grant for Las Marthas, a feature-length documentary that follows Daniella, a third generation Mexican American debutante, and other high school seniors with exclusive lineage, as they are presented in the annual Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball in Laredo, Texas. Imagine an enchanting dress that takes girls back in time to an era when emerging democratic ideals gave shape to a new government and a bill of rights. An exclusive dress that is the heart beat of family legacies as it gets passed down, modified, and updated from mother to daughter, for generations. For 113 years, the Society of Martha Washington has staged its annual Colonial Pageant and Ball on George Washingtons birthday exclusively for the debutante presentation of their 17-year-old daughters. Affectionately called Las Marthas, the Society of Martha Washington studies the quotidian life of George and Martha Washington in order to choose a presumably authentic event as a theme for its Colonial Pageant and Ball. Ibarras film follows several of the Society daughters and an elite dressmaker as they negotiate and prepare for this extraordinary rite of passage. The construction of each dress reveals the pleasure of imagining, performing and negotiating the history, nationality, culture and privilege that creates not only the Mexican American debutante, but also her second-class, darker-skinned, less privileged Mexican American counterpart.