Past
Grantees

A grant was awarded to GABRIELA ILIJESKA for a narrative short titled Azra, a story about a young girl who longs for her family's old life in her home country as her parents attempt to forge a better life in America. The film will focus on Azra's perception of the new world, her rebellion against it, and her escapism into dreams where raspberries grow all year around, where her father is an astronaut, not an asbestos worker, and her mother is a beautiful queen, not a waitress. The film will use a visual style of storytelling, with little to no dialogue, blended with fantasy imagery that provides an important relief from the claustrophobic and cluttered reality in which the family lives.

MOLLY WORRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, CARRIE VOLK, St. Paul, Minnesota, and CARRIE BUSH, Minneapolis, Minnesota, were awarded a grant for Golden Hour, a mixed media HD and 16mm narrative short about a man named Jim who wakes up to the gray world around him. He suffers from dementia and is desperate to remember his past. His memories are tangled together in filmstrips projected in the black box of his mind. He relies on his book of prompts and Post-It reminders to carry him through the daywithout them, simple tasks like remembering to turn off the stove and take his medication are completely forgotten. Jim wanders alone in life but chases the fragmented memory of a lost love. As the visions of this love are revealed, his memories begin to invade his realitysnow speckled streets are blurred with crashing waves and hot summer sand. Jim becomes consumed with unraveling the Golden Hour. Near the end of the film, as his fragmented memories come rushing back in full clarity, he realizes the missing memories stolen by dementia have been romanticized and are better left forgotten.

A grant was awarded to HOSSEIN KESHAVARZ for Dog Sweat, a narrative film about the schism between six young Iranians and their more conservative elders, in a country where over two-thirds of the population is under thirty. The film aspires to show the real Iran, a portrayal neither sanctioned by the government nor seen by the outside world. An Iran where young people drink alcohol, party, socialize with members of the opposite sex and cautiously allow themselves to be gay, all behind closed doors and blackened windows. The young actors in this fictional film, which was shot in Iran on HD video, put themselves at great risk to participate. The risk was worth taking in their view in order to tell the stories of this film.

CRAIG MACNEILL received a grant for Henley, a narrative short about a ten-year-old boy named Ted Henley who lives with his father in their run down motel on a desolate stretch of road. He earns his tiny allowance by collecting and removing the road kill that litters the highway. But when the motel cash register starts to run dry, Ted decides to turn his attention to collecting bigger game. This film was inspired by Clay McLeod Chapman's Miss Corpus, which, according to Macneill, weaves together honest human emotion with peculiar and atypical situations.

JOHN MAGARY received support for Antoinette, a feature-length narrative about a womans unfinished battle with life, an ecstatic chronicle chasing its defiant subject across four decades as she raises seven kids amidst the pain, joy, death, and rebirth of the city she calls home. And where is her home? Its New Orleans, a place like no other, tumbling down the backside of Americas twentieth century. Scenes from Antoinettes life spill out in chronological disorder, in bursts short and long, with the random force of memorya history, a dance, a delirious harnessing. From her self-imposed name change at seven, to her first child at seventeen, to a disastrous brawl in the projects at twenty-nine, to her post-Katrina exile in San Antonio, Antoinette takes a hopscotch through time with ailing siblings, battered suitors, determined girls, belligerent boys, and one very tough woman.

MARLO PORAS received a grant for Untitled China Documentary (working title), a feature-length documentary about a spirited daughter of a rapidly disappearing matriarchal society, who is thrust into China's recent economic downturn when she loses the only job she's ever known. As she scours a hustling wholesale market in Beijing for affordable gifts to bring home to her family, 25-year old Jua Ma stretches $40 far beyond its imaginable value. Arms loaded with bags, she's nostalgic as she crowds onto the subway and heads to the tiny basement apartment she shares with nine of her co-workers. It's her last night in Beijing and she is still reeling from the recent closure of Madami, the ethnic minority themed bar where she's worked as a hostess and performer for the past four years. Beijing's fiercely competitive job market and rising cost of living have left her with only one option-to return home to her remote village in Yunnan Province, leaving the city for good. With her life savings of $360 safely tucked in her bra, Jua Ma sets off on a three-day train ride home. Untitled China Documentary is about her journey to this point in her life and beyond, where hopes surrounding the Olympics and other possibilities of new employment failed to materialize.

A grant was awarded to ROSEMARY SINDT, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of Love-Life, a film that is a poem, a love song, and an image journey to elucidate faith, hope, and connectedness. The characters in the film are Rosemary Sindt, the films director, producer, and poet laureate, who endeavors to recreate the images of her poems and the emotions of her life; and Chris Thomas, the cinematographer, editor, image voyager and experimental rule breaker. Love-Life is a tale of the quest for the sacred and spiritual that is available in the everyday; beauty waiting to be recognized, captured and kept. The film appears in broad strokes of watercolor. With her moviemaker eyes wide open, the filmmaker will explore the concept of love in the physical and ethereal world.

DUNCAN SKILES AND MASIE COCHRAN were awarded support for a feature-length documentary titled Still Life. The subject of this documentary, Frank Newmyer, is an evangelical taxidermist whose glory days are behind him as he struggles to create the crowning work of his career. According to filmmakers Skiles and Cochran, there is a cultural backlash against taxidermists in the country. Starting from its earliest stages, taxidermy, outside of the museum, was stigmatized and banished to backrooms, basements, and dusty attics. The cultural backlash against taxidermists is not surprising. Taxidermy is unsettling, first because the process is grisly, but also because it blurs the line between life and death. Dead things that mysteriously come to life-zombies, vampires, ghosts-are frightening. A dead animal posed to look alive embodies the idea of the living dead. However, at the same time, the need to preserve an animal that was lost or destroyed gets at something essentially human. Taxidermy charms death to a halt, if only to suspend it in an eerie half-life. For Frank Newmyer, the subject of Still Life, taxidermy is not a reminder of death-it's an affirmation of life.

WILLIAM SLICHTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received support for The Feathered Ogre, a narrative short based on an Italian folk tale by Italo Calvino, and reinterpreted by Slichter as a modern satire. It will integrate live action with surreal animated paintings to deliver a story of art and political fantasy. The work is centered on a man who seeks a feather from an ogre to heal a king. The man ultimately gains the ogre's wisdom from acquaintances he makes as he sets out on a journey pursuing the feather. The film contains classic themes such as the triumph of good over evil, where the wicked are punished and the brave hero is rewarded for his courageous good deeds with wealth and marriage to a beautiful girl. This revised version of the original story will emerge as a collision of imagery from modern environmental calamities and themes of social injustice, framed against a 12th century Italian story, characters and landscape.

BRYAN C. VUE, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and MONG VANG, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant in support of Skies of Autumn, a feature-length narrative about a Hmong American man named Teng, whose personal journey coping with his imminent death, and the hardships that arise from his terminal illness, lead him to a lake cabin where he can be one with nature and live his life in solitude. While there, he meets Amy, a woman who helps him gain appreciation for his family, find peace within himself, and ultimately conquer his fear of death. The twist to the story is that Tengs journey to the cabin never really took place; it was a spiritual journey to the other side, a concept, deeply felt by Hmong people, which espouses the belief that when a person dies, his or her soul returns to its place of origin and is reunited with ancestral spirits.

REMY WEBER received a grant for a documentary entitled Kiss the Past Goodbye. In 1972, the radiant, hell-bent photographer and filmmaker Daniel Seymour mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia. Seymour was 27 years old and enjoying youth, a bohemian existence and recent artistic success. He had just beaten his addiction to heroin and stood to inherit as much as $30 million from his mother, Isabella Stewart Peabody Gardner, a member of one of Bostons richest families. Traces of Danny are everywhere. Theres an unprinted picture of him taken by renowned photographer Annie Liebovitz on a contact sheet. Theres Danny rolling sound and shooting up with groupies in Robert Franks black market documentary of the l972 Rolling Stones tour, Cocksucker Blues. Scratch the surface a little further theres Danny in his Bowery loft with Yoko Ono and John Lennon shooting their film The Fly. Theres Dannys name in the credits of Larry Clarks groundbreaking monograph, Tulsa. For a number of years, all roads led to Danny; rock n roll, film and art all intersected at his door. In the quest for clues to Dannys disappearance buried within his mysterious wake, Weber has sought out those closest to him, like Paco Grande and his wife at the time, actress Jessica Lange. The elusive Robert Frank, in addition to other well-known artists like Larry Clark and Danny Lyon, is also interviewed.

Support was awarded to GABRIELLE WEISS for The Color of Land, a documentary about John Boyd, the leader of an unassailably good cause, but a leader who almost always loses. A young African American from Virginia, Boyd is one of few black farmers in the country who still owns his land and makes a living from it. He is also the founder of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA), an organization dedicated to fighting for the thousands of African-American farmers who have not been so fortunate as Boyd, and who are now struggling against powerful odds to hold on to their land and their livelihoods. Boyds crusade is about to enter its second decade. He and the other NBFA members brought a class-action suit against the US Department of Agriculture in 1999, claiming the agency had systematically denied black farmers loans while providing ready financial assistance to white ones. Although the USDA admitted to discrimination and agreed to pay each demonstrably wronged farmer $50,000 the victory proved hollow. Thousands of black farmers were shut out of the settlement because they lacked access to USDA documents that would have proved their claims; thousands more simply never received their promised checks in the mail. More bitter still, very few farmers were able to get back their lost land that often had been in their families for generations. This film tells their stories from the perspective of John Boyd.

A grant was awarded to NATALIA ALMADA for a documentary entitled El General. Dictator, iron-man, nun-burner, father of modern Mexico, Natalia Almada's great-grandfather, Plutarco Elias Calles was the president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928. El General is a feature-length film about the conflicting history Almada inherited as the great-granddaughter of one of Mexico's most controversial figures and the socio-economic injustice that has prevailed from the Revolution of 1910 to the present. El General is a journey into the past of Almada's family and an intimate portrait of Mexico then and now.

Support was awarded to NICOLE BRENDING for an experimental narrative short titled Grandpa, about a small town stripper who gets a call that her grandfather has died, but she must finish her shift dancing for the old men who patronize the club where she works, before allowing herself to experience the overwhelming grief she feels. The film examines the interior world of the young woman who tries to put on an outward smile while attempting and failing to do her job. The impossibility of existing between the worlds of fantasy and reality, in circumstances that blur the two, are the focus of this story.

MICHAEL BROWN received support for 25 To Life, a documentary about a young man named William Brawner, who as a one-year-old received a blood transfusion that left him HIV Positive. Brawner's family cloaked his illness in secrecy, telling no one except close family members. William himself embraced the secrecy of his HIV status well into his adulthood. He even deluded himself about the seriousness of his situation by adopting a promiscuous lifestyle of unprotected sex with many different women. After years of neglecting his illness, William's world is shattered when his doctor tells him he will die soon if he does not change his lifestyle. He reflects on his promiscuous past and decides to confront the realities of his HIV status. With great courage, he chooses to break his silence, tell his past girlfriends about his situation and announce his HIV status on a popular Philadelphia radio station. This film is about his pursuit of redemption and liberation from his dubious past.

MICHAEL COLLINS received a grant for Island Fever: The Case of Paco Larraaga, a documentary feature-length film about how a family driven grassroots campaign to save an innocent man's life culminated in the abolition of the death penalty in the Philippines. Simultaneously a murder mystery and an investigation of the endemic corruption in the post-Marcos era, the film centers on the trial of Paco Larraaga, a Mestizo (meaning of mixed European and Filipino blood) accused of killing two young sisters.

ELIZABETH MANDEL and BETH DAVENPORT were awarded support for their documentary film about the tense relationship between a Congolese woman named Rose Mapendo and her daughter Nangabire. In the late 1990s, Rose Mapendo lost her family and home to violence that engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo. She emerged from the suffering as a strong advocate of forgiveness and reconciliation. In a country where politically engineered ethnic violence has created seemingly irreparable rifts among Tutsis, Hutus and other Congolese, this remarkable woman remains a compelling voice in the beleaguered nation's search for peace and harmony. Now, Rose is confronted with a new challenge, teaching one of her most recalcitrant students how to forgive-her own daughter Nangabire. The film tells the harrowing story of this extraordinary woman and her now 17-year-old daughter as they are reunited in the United States after 12 years and a lifetime of sorrow.

LIZA DAVITCH received a grant for Czar of Cinema, a documentary on the life and work of Al Milgrom, founder of the University Film Society and the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival. The 85-year-old Milgrom has devoted more than half his life to bringing obscure films and directors from around the world to Minnesota. He travels each year to international film festivals to find new films, most of which would otherwise not be seen in Minnesota. He is a legend in film circles worldwide, hailed as the Henry Langlois of the Midwest. He is also a cantankerous, grumpy old man. According to his family, these are character traits that began in his youth with the onslaught of Attention Deficit Disorder. The toll that both his onerous character and compulsive commitment to film has had on his family, friends and colleagues will be explored in the film. Czar of Cinema will be an intimate portrait that focuses on three aspects of Milgrom's life: film programmer, filmmaker and father.

Support was awarded to JOHN HERNDON for Autopilot, a 35mm narrative short about tribalism and aggression across generations, transposed and sublimated in American suburban life. In this film, two delinquent adolescent boys, Mark and Luke, destroy bicycles in order to make Internet videos. In turn, their pranks spark a real and tragically violent conflict between their fathers.

MAI ISKANDER was awarded a grant for Garbage Dreams, a 75-minute documentary that celebrates the richness, strength and vitality of Egypt's community of indigenous garbage collectors, known as the Zaballeen or garbage people. Recycling 90% of the waste they collect, a rate unheard of in the rest of the world, 60,000 Zaballeen earn the bulk of their living from the sale of recycled material that they have gathered and processed from Cairo's streets. But what will happen to their livelihood and community now that the Egyptian government has hired multinational corporations to collect Cairo's garbage? Focusing on the lives of one teacher and two students at The Plastic Recycling School in Mokattam, Cairo's largest garbage village, this film follows the critical next chapter in the lives of the Zaballeen as they fight to find their place in this new global economy.