Past
Grantees

Support was awarded to HISHAM MUHIEDDINE BIZRI for Al-Qahera (Cairo), a narrative feature that records a single day in the lives of two men in contemporary Cairo, Ahmad and Daoud. Ahmad is a Muslim poet who leaves his lodgings after a confrontation with a fellow countryman and an American smuggler of antiquities. Daoud is a middle-aged Copt (Egyptian Christian) who is forced to leave his house after he learns that his wife plans to bring a man into their bed later that day. Daoud and Ahmad wander the streets of Cairo aimlessly. They are a father and son in search of one another. The film chronicles their nightmarish journey in a city that no longer recognizes its own inhabitants. Like the Phoenician Odysseus, they undergo many trials and tribulations before they make a final decision to leave together to another country.

A grant was awarded to VIRGILIO BRAVO in support of Estilo Hip Hop, a feature-length documentary that chronicles a youth-led movement throughout Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba that utilizes hip hop to respond to and organize against repressive dictatorships, racist educational systems, police brutality, and faltering economies. Through the compelling lives of four characters, the viewer learns how hip hop takes the role of an active vanguard for black and indigenous youth.

A grant was awarded to MARTHA COLBURN, for Wild Eastern, part animated documentary, part essay and part dramatic film exploring the living visual mythology of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and theories that have surfaced in their wake. Divided in three main sequences with inserted interviews/dramas by contemporary artists, Wild Eastern will use a cross fertilization of the traditionally fictive medium of animation and factual material such as photographs, interviews and stock footage, to pose questions of visual authenticity. The body of the film will be filmic meditations on psychological states and actual events (for which there is no visual documentation). Wild Eastern will shine a light on different aspects of the current power struggles, while embracing art, irony and beauty as tools to explore them.

Venus de Mars received support for Take My Shoulder, an experimental documentary incorporating animation about life today as a transgendered person. de Mars, a transgendered musician, performance artist and filmmaker, sees this as an historic period in which transgendered persons are defining themselves and their rights. Take My Shoulder is a personal view of this changing tide.

LISA FISHER was awarded a grant for Positive Women, a one-hour documentary exploring the intersection of health, sexuality, and aging as it delves into the complex lives of three older women living with HIV. As their stories unfold over time, preconceptions about older women are challenged, and viewers discover why the incidence rate of HIV infection for the over-fifty population is rising twice as fast as younger adults.

JOSHUA FRANKEL received a grant for Bicycle Messengers, a short film about New York City bicycle messengers in which all the messengers are digitally animated and all the backgrounds and environments are live action footage shot in Midtown Manhattan. By juxtaposing the animated messenger on top of the live action video, the film highlights the peculiar relationship between bicycle messengers and the modern city in which they operate.

A grant was awarded to RICHARD HANKIN for Home Front, a feature-length documentary about Sergeant Jeremy Feldbusch, an Army Ranger who was seriously wounded and lost his eyesight in Iraq, as he attempts to readjust to friends, family, community - and most importantly, his new, altered self. The film is also about Feldbusch's family, and how they adjust, reconfigure and cope with events that have forever changed their lives.

SHALINI KANTAYYA was awarded a grant for A Drop of Life, a narrative short about two women, one Indian and the other African-American, and the convergence of their shared struggle to save the world's drinking water. Kantayya seeks to bring awareness to the human dimensions of global water privatization issues and to tell a compelling story about how a few people can make a difference.

JODI KAPLAN received a grant for In The Blood, an experimental short that uses the theatrical platform of a boxing ring and the intense movement of fighting to create a new type of dance. It is about the individual's fight against time, and the brink between life and death.

GREGORY KING was awarded support for Arc Hive (33), an experimental film based on the process of shooting Super-8 film every day for one year. It is a personal cinematic journey exploring time, coincidence, interpretation, and the poetic-spiritual reckoning of chance and circumstance.

A grant was awarded to JOANNA KOHLER for Uppercut Boxing Gym, a documentary based on a North East Minneapolis gym that is giving birth to something historic. Eight women are boxing their way onto the timeline of women's sports and stretching the boundaries of feminism and violence. The first all female amateur boxing team is preparing for the August 2005 Golden Gloves International Competition in St. Louis, Missouri. This film will chronicle their lives as they train and compete.

TERESA KONECHNE was awarded a grant in support of fertile ground: rural women, the diaspora and our changing landscapes, an experimental personal narrative nonfiction video about Konechne's internal/external journey home to capture the lives of South Dakota rural women, and those who have left. Konechne seeks to tell the history of the place, the relationship of its women to the prairie, and the increasingly hostile economics that render farm life all but extinct.

Support was awarded to MARIE LOSIER for The Ontological Cowboy, an experimental portrait of Richard Foreman, the renowned playwright who founded and directs the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church. The film features several interviews with Foreman and performances by Tom Ryder Smith, Jay Smith, and Juliana Francis, who star in Foreman's most recent play, King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe! The work further develops Losier's style of personal documentary portrait filmmaking.

Support was awarded to KAREN COVINGTON for The Price of Memory, a mytho-poetic experimental documentary exploring the movement for slavery reparations in the island of Jamaica. It links the present to the past by exploring how the legacies of slavery still affect present-day Jamaica generations, and why some believe in reparations while others are opposed. The film also examines the filmmaker's search for personal truth growing up in Jamaica.

ALBERT MILGROM received a grant for The Dinkytown Uprising, a documentary that juxtaposes student activist protests against the incursion of a fast-food chain on the University of Minnesota campus called The Red Barn with the macrocosmic anti-Vietnam war protests in the Spring of 1970. The film also aspires to see how attitudes of some participants have changed over time.

JILA NIKPAY received a grant in support of Rhythm of Tides, the third in a trilogy of short films that address issues of dislocation, loss and memory. The trilogy is a personal response to the current conditions in Nikpay's country of Iran, and part of a larger body of work of both film and photography. Rhythm of Tides will be a cinematic essay, halfway between narrative and metaphor. Nikpay will combine evocative visual imagery, sound-design, and minimal voice-over into a dense poetic film.

A grant to TOMOKO OGUCHI was awarded for Folklore Restaurant, an animated short film that explores the strength of three fox-tales originating from Native American, Finish and Japanese folklore. In all three stories, the fox is associated with fire. Animated characters are created with rare Japanese paper (washi) and sometimes appear on the background of originally filmed aurora borealis.

J.P. OLSEN received support for The Narcotics Farm, a historical documentary about the Federal Government's failed attempt to find a cure for drug addiction between 1935 and 1975. Through experimentation on drug-addicted prisoners at a prison farm in Lexington, Kentucky, this film explores the government's morally questionable research and treatment of prisoners.

BARI PEARLMAN was awarded support for Daughters of Wisdom, a feature-length documentary about the rebuilding and revitalizing of Northeast Tibet through the education and cultivation of women to their fullest potential. Situated on the Eastern Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas, the Nangchen district of Kham (now China's Qinghai Province) is home to an estimated 60,000 subsistence farmers and nomadic herding families. Relegated to subservient roles in their families, the women of Nangchen have for centuries been regarded as simple creatures capable of little more than churning butter, bearing children and saying prayers. A woman in this culture has had to choose between marrying and being a servant to her husband, or becoming a nun, and remaining a servant to her family. But now, for the first time, the women of Nangchen are being given the skills and opportunities to become active participants in preserving Tibetan cultural heritage, improving their local educational infrastructure, and preparing their people to effectively navigate the encroaching modern world. This film will present a vividly intimate portrait of the lives of Nangchen's women.

MARA V. PELECIS received a grant in support of Souvenirs, a feature documentary exploring the suicide of the filmmaker's father, and the lives of other veterans. The work seeks to understand the emotional and spiritual impact of wars on those who fight them.