Past
Grantees

MARIE LOSIER was awarded a grant for The Ballad of Genesis P-Orridge, an experimental film that is a portrait of one of the most controversial, fearless, and renowned experimental artists of our time. A key figure of the underground music scene for over 30 years, a cult artist in the pre-punk and post-punk bands Throbbing Gristle (1975 to 1981) and Psychic TV (1981 to present), Genesis is considered the father of industrial music and a pioneer of acid house and techno. Collaborations of Genesis with such people as W.S. Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Brion Gysin, and Francis Bacon, to name but a few, have proven seminal. Not content with merely breaking new ground in music, Genesis has instigated a daring assault on the fundamentals of biology. Placing transformation at the core of his life, Genesis and his now deceased lover and collaborator, Lady Jaye Breyer, embarked on a project entitled The Pandrogeny, an attempt to deconstruct their individual identities in order to create a third being, The Breyer P-Orridge. To this end, Genesis changed from a He into a She, embodying a unique life of experiment, of which Lady Jaye remains an integral part in memoriam. Genesis has made his body a shape-shifting work of art. This film will be a playful, agile, raw, cut-up and hand-spliced patchwork of iconic images, capturing the constant activity, flow and theatricality of Genesiss world: an entertaining collision of daily life, fiction, history, music, and myth.

IRINA PATKANIAN was awarded a grant in support of Living Here. Kamchatka tale., an feature-length documentary. The film tells the story of the Russian/Itelmen community of Dolinovka, a village on the Kamchatka peninsula, across from Alaskas Aleutian Islands, on a river that has been eroding its banks for decades. In the 1980s, the central Soviet government decided to save Dolinovka by constructing a modern town in a drier location nearby. Residents packed up their wooden houses in Old Dolinovka and moved to New Dolinovka, where their concrete apartments had plumbing and electricity, and the town had schools and a restaurant. With Perestroika, though, government financing stopped and, in turn, so did the towns supply of water and heat. Residents were ordered to vacate their premises and return to Old Dolinovka. The still-unfinished New Dolinovka turned into a ghost town, where the ghosts of the Soviet regime found permanent refuge. Today, New Dolinovka is a monument to a failed Soviet dream, completely reclaimed by wildlife. Through this highly experimental and very nontraditional documentary film, Irina Patkanian wants to give audiences a glimpse into the lives of four individuals, all representative of the common people of Russia, and in looking into their lives reflect on such urgent universal themes as abandonment and responsibility, security and freedom.

A grant was awarded to ANN PRIM, St. Paul, for Little Words, a narrative short that is the first story of The Vellum Trilogy, a collection of three fictional vignettes written by Ann Prim in the fall of 2009. Each story of The Vellum Trilogy takes a brief but intimate look into the lives of gay women writers and painters. The view is a private glimpse, where life and art intersect and memory is a story of interior landscapes. The Vellum Trilogy was conceived to be seen either as a single work or as three individual short films. Little Words is the story of a young writer, Rhys, who values her private world of words over all else. She is a Post-Modernist outsider who methodically strips from her life that which interferes and distracts. Beginning work on her second novel and awaiting word on whether her first novel will be published, she leaves her lover only to encounter someone who completely fractures her solitude and gives her the opportunity to reassess her reclusiveness.

JENNIFER REDFEARN received a grant for Sun Come Up, a character-driven documentary that follows the relocation of some of the worlds first environmental refugees, The Carteret Islandersa matrilineal society of 3,000 people living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. The Carteret Islanders inhabit six pristine islands, 50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and share a rich tradition of music, dance, and storytelling. For centuries, theyve lived on a diet of fresh fish, bananas and vegetables, and without cars, electricity, or running water. Their carbon footprint leaves one of the lightest impressions on the planet. Now, however, a modern crisis has intruded upon them, and their idyllic community is on the verge of dramatic change. Their small islands stand at the frontlines of climate change. Rising seas contaminate their fresh water and gardening land, erode their shoreline, and contribute to severe and unpredictable weather. The Carteret Islanders currently face three urgent problems: increasing population, decreasing access to food and water, and the rapidly shrinking land mass of the islands. Sun Come Up follows charismatic and passionate relocation leader Ursula Rakova and a group of young people from the Carteret Islands as they search for a new place to call home.

JESSE ROESLER, Minneapolis, received a grant for The Starfish Throwers (formerly Give Me Your Hungry), a 60-minute documentary that aims to explore ways that several driven and daring individuals have taken the war against hunger into their own hands in unexpected, innovative and sometimes controversial ways. Allen Law is a retired Minneapolis schoolteacher who will hand out over 170,000 sandwiches this year. Mary Risley is the founder of Food Runners, a San Francisco based food redistribution organization that delivers more than 22,000 pounds of food each week to shelters and group homes. Greg Pettengill is the founder of Guerilla Gardeners for the Homeless in Orlando, Florida. Give Me Your Hungry will chronicle the stories of these individuals who are on the front lines of the war on hunger. Roesler will weave their stories together into a larger narrative on ending hunger in Americaone act of food sharing, redistributing or growing at a time.

DUSTIN ROSEMARK, Rochester, received support for Blue Hands, a series of experimental films exploring a new animation process the filmmaker calls the Cyanograph. Blue Hands will consist of six to eight, twenty to thirty second films created to mimic certain films within the Edison Library. Rosemark is immensely interested in the films that make up the Edison Library, a collection of works produced between the 1890s and 1920, which eventually came under the control of the Motion Picture Patents Company, owned by Thomas Alva Edison. The films are among the earliest ever created and are of great importance to the history of cinema. They deal with simple subjects such as Record of a Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1900), Feeding Seagulls (1900), or Freight Train (1898), and are best described by the term actuality films. Rosemarks films will be similarly minimalist in technique and subject, but will also be very specific, as they will focus exclusively on hands in the act of creation. Rosemarks cyanographic process will also be a feature that distinguishes Blue Hands from the Edison filmsa painstaking and very involved motion picture version of the blue-tinted photographic Cyanotype. The films are intended as a commentary on contemporary film craft and an expression of Rosemarks personal identity as an artist/filmmaker.

JENNY SCHMID, Minneapolis, received a grant for VLD SK8R GRL (Veiled Skater Girl), a 20-minute live action and animation video that engages the layered meanings of the headscarf as a contested political and cultural symbol. This project aspires to present a compelling visual depiction of the powerful young Muslim woman through the cultural filter of the headscarf. Schmid believes the West focuses on the headscarf as a symbol of oppression, while this clothings function and fashion are much more complicated. As the Iranian protests demonstrate, womens political power is not limited by their choice of dress. The headscarf, however, remains a point of contention, especially in Europe where the debate around limits on wearing the headscarf have become very public. The revival of the headscarf might also be embraced as a statement of unity against ubiquitous Western influencean event that is taking place both militarily and culturally. Schmid believes that the Western media has hyped this symbol as a one-dimensional threat; it has become a polarizing flashpoint. She will travel to Istanbul, Turkey, where East and West converge, and use it as an allegorical backdrop for this projects conceptual foundation. Her hope is that VLD SK8R GRL will play a role in creative resistance to assumptions and controversies surrounding the headscarf.

ANAL SHAH, St. Cloud, was awarded a grant for ChalChitra-RailYatra, a 60-minute experimental documentary tale about Railways and Cinema, the marriage between the two, by way of revisiting images of railways in Indian Cinema interwoven with a personal journey of the filmmaker aboard various trains in India. India has the worlds largest railway network; it is also the biggest film industry in the world. While one is a mode of transportation, the other is a medium that transports us. We stand in long lines for their tickets. The Train takes us on a journey, which may provide the longest tracking shot of the Indian landscape. The Movie, on the other hand, suspends our disbelief and takes us on a journey of its own diegesis. Both of these vehicles, individually and combined, blur, break, bridge and ultimately redefine the notion of borders and boundaries in the collective experience that constitutes and continues to evolve as the Indian Psyche. Structurally and visually this film will shunt seamlessly between the two parallel tracks. One will trace the memory of trains in films as seen through clips/shots of archival material accompanied by the filmmakers commentary. The other will be the filmmakers own personal journey with a camera aboard trains through an intimately observed cinema verite approach. The first track evokes history and memory, while the other invokes reality.

Maia Wechsler received support for a documentary on a dramatic act by Melvin and Jean McNair, marking the beginning of a long journey that transformed them into fugitives from American justice and a cause celebre in France.

GABRIEL WINER received a grant for The Terrors of Basket Weaving, a narrative short thriller about a woman who becomes possessed after discovering a basket near her beach home. The woman is in her late thirties and is a hardworking New York publicist who has never had children. When she mends the basket, she is struck by a feeling of terror, and soon becomes haunted by an ancient presence. She struggles with this strange possession, moving between the alienating modernity of the city and the escapist cottage on the cape that she shares with her husband. She tries to ignore the basket, or to treat it normally, but it continues to haunt her. When her husband refuses to believe her suspicions of the basket, she loses her self-control and destroys it in desperation. She returns to New York hoping the ordeal is behind her, but the terror remains, somewhere inside of her. She has no choice but to listen to the voices within her, accept her fate, and live.

A grant was awarded to JESSICA WOLFSON and PAUL LOVELACE, for Radio Unnameable, a feature-length documentary about legendary New York City disc jockey Bob Fass, who revolutionized free expression on the airwaves with his long running FM program Radio Unnameable, which has served as a cultural hub for music, politics, and audience engagement for nearly 50 years. Fass changed the landscape of radio by developing a patchwork of music, politics, ideas and news from the streets, and cultivating it into an exciting freeform experiment. For half a century, he revolutionized the New York City airwaves at midnight on listener-sponsored WBAI. This film documents his eventful career and his involvement with some of the most gripping cultural movements of our time, while placing his story in a larger context of struggling to keep free expression on the dial.

JEREMY XIDO received support for The Angola Project, a documentary film about peopleAfrican and Chinesewhose lives are intimately intertwined through the Chinese reconstruction of the Benguela Railway in Angola. Its a road movie. Or in this case, a rail movie. Travelling across country, Simo Branco de Sousa, a former child soldier, passes through the lives of a series of characters, Chinese and Angolan, who have all pinned their hopes and dreams for the future on this massive reconstruction project: Jing-Wei Zhang (aka Linda), a pretty young vivacious translator working for the CR-20 construction company; Manuel, the equally young and hopeful Angolan train driver finally living his childhood dream; Filomena, the owner of a tiny bar and mother of a sick girl; Ji Hong, a fifty-two-year-old Chinese transport train driver with a crush on Filomena; and finally, Sheng Li Xiao, a worn down construction worker with a deep gambling debt who lays train tracks in the middle of nowhere. As the train plunges through the countryside, the film will dive into the intimate personal stories of these people who have clustered around the train line like moths drawn to a light bulb in the middle of the night. They each put an idiosyncratic human face to one of the major Global phenomena of the 21st century the Chinese reconstruction of Africa.

JOHN AKRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant for Walker and Driver, an animated feature comedy musical about what happens when cars get a little too important. Walker, one of two central characters in the film, is a race car ace who grew up in the grandstands of a motor raceway and was born to drive. After a tragic accident during a big race, he gives up driving and secretly walks from place to place for transportation. His wife, Penny Driver, the other central character in the film, writes copy for automobile advertising. She seeks to transcend her daily life by creating advertisements that strive to convey the sensation of the absolute perfect driving experience. As world traffic jams increase, Walker has to try harder and harder to hide his secret life as a pedestrian. His wife is close to discovering his secret when a series of car crashes incapacitate most of her body. But her head is preserved, which allows her continue to develop automobile advertising that inspires the world to continue dreaming about ideal automobiles. When all the cars of the world smash into a massive Wreckage Mountain, it is up to Walker, who has found a spot on top of the mountain, to teach the rest of the world how to walk again. This animated tale is a direct expression of the filmmakers personal viewpoint as a pedestrian who often feels like an outsider in a world occupied by cars.

MARY BILLYOU received a grant for GUN, HAT, an experimental film in five sections that the maker describes as a compendium of narrative film using only its iconic elements: a gun, a hat, low-key lighting, screams, and a sexy lady. Shot on black and white 16mm film, GUN, HAT recalls film noir and its surrounding fantasies of nostalgic return. Shot on location in New York City's Chinatown, The Bowery, Central Park, and Fifth Avenue, the film follows the close-up action of hands wielding guns and heads wearing Fedoras. Other sections of the film will focus on different soundtracks of screams and a sexy lady dressed in a sequined gown who stands on a bare stage in front of a large curtain. Lighting will be used to great effect in the film to not only recall the film noir aesthetic, but also in conjunction with the film's other elements, to illustrate the Godard directive that in order to make a film, all you need is a girl and a gun.

A grant was awarded to LISA BLACKSTONE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of Grappling Girls, an intimate hour-long documentary about girls and women who defy preconceived notions and societal disapproval as they pursue the worlds oldest sport. One of the central characters in the film, a 13-year-old girl named Audra, readies herself for a major competition. Her skintight outfit is red. Her eyes are watchful. A man and a woman whisper advice in her ears. She bounces in anticipation of the battle ahead. What Audra is about to do is perfectly legal, not particularly well known, and often frowned upon by those who have encountered it. Audra is about to engage in a wrestling matchan old-fashioned, get-down-on-the-mat, competitive, mano a mano wrestling match. Audra is a grappling girla female wrestler. Grappling Girls is an intimate look into the thoughts and lives of Audra and other girls and women who pursue a passion for wrestling.

IAN CHENEY, was awarded support for The City Dark, a feature-length documentary about light pollution and the disappearance of the night. Posing the deceptively simple question-why do we need the night?-Cheney leads viewers on a quest to understand what is lost in the glare of city lights. Blending a humorous tone with majestic time-lapse footage of the night sky, Cheney creates what he calls an unprecedented portrait of our world after dusk, and a meditation on our relationship to the stars. It is a personal journey rooted in New York City, but bringing viewers as far afield as Shanghai, Paris, and Mauna Kea, The City Dark reveals how cancer studies, energy crises, and disrupted ecosystems are adding unprecedented urgency to astronomers' quest to darken our city lights.

CARTER GUNN & ROSS MCDONNELL were awarded a grant for Colony, a documentary that seeks to present an allegory of the state of the American nation through the voices of its commercial beekeepers. For the last two years, beekeepers have been battling the effects of the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease that is wiping out massive numbers of honeybees, putting at risk over a third of the agricultural production of the United States and threatening a multibillion dollar industry. This film taps into many of the issues that are prevalent and pressing in our broader society, not just the world of the beekeeper. The environment, government, a future of uncertainty and a distrust of the other are all issues that unconsciously burden us. In a strange intertwining of the fate of man and insect, many of these issues are currently manifest in the plight of the American honeybee. Has this insect, selfless in its dedication to the colony above all else, prized by man for thousands of years, producer of what many say is the worlds only perfect food source, sounded some kind of alarm bell for humanity?

STEPHEN GUREWITZ, Golden Valley, Minnesota, was awarded a grant for Thanks Minnesota, a feature-length fictional narrative film about a father, divorced from his wife and estranged from his two grown sons, who spends his days alone in his familys deserted suburban home. After a doctors diagnosis that his cancer treatment is failing, he urgently plans a weekend camping trip with his sons. Without telling them about his condition, he attempts to resuscitate the father-to-son bond that he neglected in the past. The film explores themes of family, death and aging, as well as the courage necessary for a family to begin expressing intimacy and affection so late in life.

EMILY HADDAD, Stillwater, Minnesota, received a grant for a short experimental documentary titled Artist in the Margin, which explores the world of artist Pierre Prevost. It examines the questions: What impulse compels an artist to create, and Does an artist intend to affect his society and his environment? Haddad will explore how the special world created by Pierre Prevost demonstrates answers to these questions and how this modern artist can be related to prehistoric artists of the famous caves located in the same region of southern France where he lives. Haddad first entered the world of Pierre Prevost nine years ago. His home of Combarel (little hollow) is on several acres of forested land in the little-known region of Aveyron. Just a few miles away are the caves of Lascaux and Peche Merle, where prehistoric artists painted their environment and their imaginings, much like Prevost creates sculptures, drawings, paintings, and other forms of art from discarded objects he finds in junkyards and flea markets of surrounding villages. Haddad will examine his unique world, with an emphasis on its alignment with the similarly austere worlds of the cave artists of Lascaux and Peche Merle.

DARIN HEINIS was awarded support for Detachment, a narrative short about an Iraq War veteran who attempts to assimilate back into his prewar life, and his struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Jack constantly revisits the horrors he witnessed in combat. He must confront those issues, and the dark shadow they cast on his life, in order to heal and finally realize that what happened in the past was not his fault. The story comes from a very personal place, as the filmmaker is a Gulf War veteran. Although he does not suffer from PTSD, he understands how the condition can be all consuming to those who do. Detachment is his attempt to tell the story of one mans struggle to conquer his war-related demons.