Past
Grantees

A grant was awarded to ANA JOANES for Really Delicious, a documentary that looks at the alternative food movement in the United States. By focusing on solutions to the problems created by the industrial food system, this film will illustrate the far-reaching transformative potential of daily food choices. Really Delicious will follow the personal journey of the filmmaker through the heartland of America in her quest to feel connected to the food she consumes. As she travels, she meets a diverse group of people who educate and inspire her regarding the foods we eat and their impact on our lives.

Support was awarded to ERIK LEVINE for Cocker, an experimental film about the perception and meaning of cultural masculinity and values as seen through the ritual and history of cockfighting. Shot primarily in Puerto Rico, Cocker will focus on the atmosphere and attitudes of the participants engaged in a controversial competition with deep cultural roots. According to Levine, cockfighting has by some accounts the largest global viewing audience in the world, second only to soccer. It illustrates the collective dualities and ambiguities deeply held within us. It is outlawed in some countries, and celebrated in others. In a complex world wherein opposing viewpoints and beliefs are held as the basis for certain moral and ethical convictions, this piece will abstract and magnify our societal fascination with combat and death in visually rich images that evoke the complexities and deeply held masculine traits of demarcation, competition, power, custom and culture. Cocker will be harsher than Levine's earlier films, as it observes how men seek self-esteem and pride through a sport whose days may well be numbered in a world increasingly sensitive to animal rights.

KALUP LINZY received funding for an experimental narrative short called Notes From a Limerent. Wikipedia defines Limerent as an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person (the limerent object). This somewhat offbeat film is inspired by the 2006 Hollywood feature Notes on a Scandal in which Barbara Covett (Judy Dench) teaches history at a comprehensive school in London, England. A lonely old spinster, Barbara's primary relationship is with herself by means of a diary that she compulsively keeps-the only intimate relationship in her life. Limerent will tell the story of a novelist who is in love with his best friend, a drifter, who is dating a photographer. The novelist, who is the film's narrator, and is referred to as Man 3, documents his feelings in a journal, which are also notes for his next novel. In desperation, he resorts to the practice of black magic to gain the romantic love of the drifter. This unorthodox new work was largely motivated by what Kalup Linzy views as a lack of appreciation of Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender R&B and Hip-Hop artists in American culture.

DANIEL LUNDQUIST received support for Filled in Blank, a ten-minute animated film on the subject of personal responsibility. The film looks at a man in his last day of life as he takes a look back on various self-created events that not only changed him but also shaped many of the elements surrounding him, and thus defined the person he became. He discovers that he and he alone, is responsible for his actions and feelings. Lundquist, the maker of this film, believes that in a world where so many people are looking to blame others for their problems, it is often our failure to look inward that results in the consequences we suffer.

A grant was awarded to CATRIN MAGNUSSON for Becoming George, a seven-minute narrative short about a farmer who buys a lilac shirt that helps him emerge from his protective shell and connect with the world. The film is based on a poem by Leo Dangel called Farming in a Lilac Shirt. Magnusson was drawn to the poem due to its strong message of belonging to a place or home. The farmer in the poem has lost his wife and the security she brought him. His lilac shirt helps to redefine and challenge him as he etches a new place for himself in his surrounding community.

JOHN MENICK received support for Paris Syndrome, a short, experimental, cinematic essay analyzing the cultural implications of travel-related mental illness. In the fall of 2006, several U.S. and U.K. newspapers ran stories concerning psychological breakdowns experienced by Japanese citizens traveling in Paris, France. In an average of a dozen cases a year, Japanese travelers would undergo extreme depression and cultural rejection, sometimes culminating in hallucinations and traumatic shock. According to these articles, it was Professor Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist living in France, who was the first to identify this condition as Paris Syndrome. Journalists located the syndrome's origins in the cultural differences between France and Japan. Japanese travelers often held idealistic views of Paris, mostly concerning culturally specific expectations of service industry customs, societal manners, and urban hygiene. When Paris did not live up to these expectations, a small group of travelers would descend into depression, then into psychosis, requiring medical treatment. The cultural shock has been so regular that, as reported by the BBC, the Japanese embassy created a 24-hour hotline for those suffering from the syndrome. Paris Syndrome places the disorder within an ongoing history of cross-cultural relations; the emergence of a global tourist industry; and the creation of psychiatric schools of thought devoted to inter-cultural relations. This and related syndromes are subject to critical debates concerning cultural stereotyping.

SUSANNAH PATRICE MORSE was awarded a grant for Haunted by the Light, a 16mm experimental short that is a study of children's fantasy author Susan Cooper in the real and imagined worlds that inspired her. The film illustrates the creative process of Cooper, author of the Newbery award-winning children's fantasy series The Dark is Rising. Her stories are the hauntings of a child grown old and her secrets carried from Britain to America after years of longing for home. The film follows the path of Cooper's mind as she writes-her memories, words and the quiet scratch of her pen on paper in the attic where she works. Haunted by the Light will be a set of images, sounds and text that will interact with time and magic.

ELINYISIA MOSHA received support for a feature-length documentary, Anatomy of Poverty, inspired by a recent trip she took to her family home, which is situated near the mining regions of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. While there, she stumbled upon a unique microcosm of people through which the story of the human costs, societal impact and corruptive elements of globalization could be told. Through Mosha's unique access, Anatomy of Poverty will follow several compelling characters as it paints a complex portrait of corruptive forces in the mineral extraction industry. The film's ultimate goal is to reveal how industrialized nations attain great wealth while simultaneously perpetuating conflict and extreme poverty in developing countries.

AARON SCHOCK was awarded a grant in support of CIRCO, a visually immersive feature-length documentary examining the life, tradition and hardships of Mexico's rural traveling circuses. The film follows the Ponce family, a ten-member circus troupe, as it struggles to survive in contemporary Mexico. Living and performing on the road since the 19th century, the Ponce family is just one of thousands of traveling Mexican circuses in existence today, continuing its rich artistic tradition against the backdrop of a collapsing rural economy and declining audiences. For the Ponces, these challenges are felt intimately and have led to a crisis within the family. While one of the oldest circus families in Mexico, the Ponces are now too poor to hire outside help, which forces all the child performers in the family to strike, move, and pitch the circus themselves. The Ringmaster was born into the circus and is devoted to preserving the family tradition. His wife, who ran away with the circus at 15, becomes increasingly bitter as she watches her children give up their childhood for a life that renders few rewards. She wants out. Her decision to leave, as seen at the end of the film, resonates with consequences not only for her children and family, but also for the fate of this century-old family tradition.

NORAH SHAPIRO received support for Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile, a documentary that explores the improbable connection between a Tibetan beauty pageant and the contemporary Tibetan struggle for survival. Nestled in the majestic mountains of the outer Himalayas is Dharamsala, India, seat of the exiled Tibetan Government and home to its leader, the Dalai Lama. As an older generation of Tibetans struggles to preserve their traditional culture while living in exile, their children, who have grown up entirely outside their homeland, are exposed to the trappings of an increasingly homogeneous global youth culture. The challenges of a people facing diaspora, tensions between a desire to preserve traditions versus the need to be part of the modern world, and a universal concern amongst Tibetans about their homeland, intersect in the Miss Tibet Beauty Pageant, now approaching its eighth year. Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile transports viewers to the exotic and paradoxical realm in which a beauty pageant aims to simultaneously serve as a celebration of Tibetan girls as well as a platform for promoting its exiled people's struggle against Chinese rule. It delves into this contradictory manifestation of decades of continued exile in the midst of ever increasing global influences that are, for better or worse, unavoidable.

JACKIE SMITH received a grant for Secrets in the House of Myrrh, a narrative short about a 22-year-old nun named Zipporah who has been part of a religious community called Sisters of Piety (located on the outskirts of the conservative military town of Colorado Springs, Colorado) since she aged out of the foster care system at age 17. As part of the religious order, Zipporah not only experiences what she views as a beautiful relationship with God, she also has a stable family that promises permanence and love for the first time in her life. But she harbors a growing secret confliction about her commitment to a life of religious limitations. She starts to hunger for the outside world and is put to the test when a young soldier and friend, Luca, seeks refuge at the convent after going A.W.O.L. from the army. Zipporah finds her vows at odds with her intense personal desires and is forced to decide whether to remain in the convent or return to the outside world.

Support was awarded to RACHEL SMITH for the feature-length documentary The Problem of Haiti, which examines the effects of foreign involvement in Haiti, focusing on the United Nations stabilization mission, known as MINUSTAH. The film tells its story through the lens of Cite Soleil, a small slum community that bears the tangible, visual ramifications of destructive foreign policy. Conditions in the slum and other parts of Haiti have been called worse than Darfur, with Cite Soleil singled out as the most dangerous place in the world according to the United Nations. The Problem of Haiti is a multidimensional film that melds verit footage of everyday Haitian life with interviews of UN officials, analysts, political actors, Haitian elite, journalists, gang members, and Cite Soleil grassroots organizations and community members-all in an effort to encourage foreign policymakers to take a more constructive role in Haiti's evolution.

VA-MEGN THOJ was awarded a grant for the documentary/narrative Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Killings, concerning the erasure of race in the media coverage of the case of the Wisconsin Hmong hunter killings, illuminating the active and ongoing occulting, or masking, of race in Hmong-white relations. The film is based on a conversation between Va-Megn Thoj and anthropologist Louisa Schein, published in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. The subject of the conversation was the 2004 killing of six white hunters by Chai Soua Vang in Wisconsin. The video work will feature elements of the real life conversation between Thoj and Schein while interweaving fictional elements extracted from a screenplay written by Thoj called Die by Night, which portrays the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically hunted and maimed by what they think is a Hmong demon from Laos. Daybreak, however, reveals to the sole survivor that it is white hunters in ski masks who have ruthlessly murdered the party over one long night. This dark story inadvertently suggests that Chai Soua Vang, vastly outnumbered by eight hostile white hunters, perceived a similar threat to his life and could see no other response than the violent one he embraced. His intent is a sustained critique of the hunting incident and the media coverage of it to provoke needed dialogue about race relations.

A grant was awarded to MIAO WANG for Beijing Taxi, a feature-length film set in the two years surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Beijing Taxi turns a humanist lens onto the personalities and changing lives of three taxi drivers: Bai Jiwen, a 55-year-old married veteran driver with a 22-year-old son; Wei Caixia, a 33-year-old married woman with a 6-year-old daughter; and Zhou Yi, a 38-year-old married man with an 8-year-old daughter. Their stories connect a morphing cityscape and tales of citizens searching for their place amidst the dizzying pace of change. Beijing Taxi takes the viewer on a lyrical journey into fragments of a society navigating the bumpy roads to modernization.

STEPHANIE WANG-BREAL was awarded a grant for White Stork Hotel, a feature-length documentary about adopted Chinese girls, their American adoptive families and the Chinese political and cultural pressures that led to their abandonment. For the past eight years, China has been the leading country for US international adoptions. There are now approximately 70,000 Chinese adoptees being raised in the United States. Ninety-five percent of them are girls. Each year these girls face new questions regarding their adopted lives and surroundings. The characters and events of this story challenge traditional notions of family, culture and race.

AVI ZEV WEIDER received support for Welcome to the Machine, a feature-length documentary that explores our relationships to technology and reveals that all discussions about technology are ultimately about human values. The film explores the possibility of machines attaining human intelligence and ultimately asks a number of intriguing questions. Is there something about being a human that cannot be replicated through machines? If we do succeed in creating an intelligent machine, a machine that acts like a human, talks like a human, thinks like a human, what will we do with it? Will we grant it consciousness when it asks for it? Will we treat it as an equal? What exactly will the future world look like? Will it be much different? Will biological human beings be on this planet at the end of the century? What makes all the technological changes present on the horizon possible, anyway? What exactly is the origin and nature of technology? Welcome to the Machine is a documentary film about the ideas, the people and the machines behind these far-reaching questions.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS was awarded a grant for Public Hearing, a 100-minute experimental cinematic reenactment of a real public hearing. The screenplay is derived from a public-domain transcript generated in the small town of Allegany, New York, which chronicles a debate surrounding a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter expansion in the area. Public Hearing synthesizes a fictional feature-film and a factual document. The original transcript was discovered on the Allegany town website, where the supporting PowerPoint visuals are also available for download. These visuals will be used in the film as props in the same way they were used during the real event as evidence. That which is not available for download, or is not accounted for in the transcript, will be imagined. Through such methods, the film will challenge the boundaries of intellectual property and public domain, and in so doing will belong to neither fact nor fiction.

SUSAN YOUSSEF received funding for Habibi Rasak Kharban (My Darling, Something's Wrong With Your Head), a narrative digital short that explores the story of a forbidden love crushed under the weight of both the Israeli occupation and traditional Islamic society of Gaza. Set in modern-day Khan Younis, it is the retelling of the famous Sufi mystical parable Majnun Layla. When the film begins, the Gaza strip has come under full closure-Palestinians are not allowed to travel in or out of Gaza via Israel. Two Palestinian college students who have been studying in the West Bank-Qays and Layla-have just been forced to return home. The two were childhood companions who used to tend sheep together. Qays fell in love with Layla in their childhood. The film references this innocent past as the time Qays and Layla spent in the West Bank; however, upon return to the Gaza strip, with the limits of curfews and checkpoints as well as societal traditions and rules, Layla is inaccessible to Qays, and he descends into madness.

NICOLE BRENDING received support for Rebel, a narrative short about a developmentally disabled man who has his first sexual encounter while out with his meth-addicted brother. The story for Rebel developed out of a mixture of experiences Brending had growing up as a delinquent in Minnesota and working as a stripper in both Minnesotan and North Dakotan clubs-the isolation of being a young person in the middle of nowhere mixed with the energy and urgency of a time bomb. Part gritty realism and part magic, Rebel represents a Midwest that is often ignored-not the Midwest of comfortable suburbs and happy upper-middle class liberals, but a Midwest in decline, suffering from the sweeping rash of meth and economic devastation in rural communities.

A grant was awarded to JUAN ANTONIO DEL ROSARIO for The System, a feature-length narrative film whose premise is based on the simple metaphor that the human body is the ultimate bureaucracy. In this film, the human body, and all its operations, is a typical modern city with a typical economic model. In this city, the Brain is a highly sophisticated corporation, charged with collecting and using data to administer virtually every operation that takes place in the system. On the other side of town, the Heart is a vast industrial complex whose sole mission is to produce and deliver oxygen to every cell/person in the System. This film explores what happens when an organism turns on itself. How does the Brain deal with self-destructive behavior? How does the tired Heart send signals indicating that it may be reaching its breaking point? The System is an allegorical story that projects the micro into the macro. Politics, social systems, cities, climate and the best and worst of human nature collide as a single organism confronts its mortality, and looks for a reason to continue existing.