Past
Grantees

MATTHEW STENERSON, Minneapolis, MN, received a grant to support How to Read a Letter at the End of a Movie, a film that presents ten movie endings in a series to examine how movie endings have lives of their own.

AMANDA TAYLOR, St. Paul, MN, was awarded a grant for Freak of Nature, a documentary combining gender theory, case studies, scientific explanations, humorous anecdotes and musical interludes about the existence of gay animals.

KANG VANG, St. Paul, MN, received support for Miskas American, a docudrama that takes place before and during the court trials of an older Hmong man named Wa Her Yang, who is convicted of murdering his wife. During the proceedings, Yang finds solace through his lawyer, a young man.

MARK WOJAHN, St. Paul, MN, was awarded funding for What America Needs 2002, an experimental documentary about the United States, a sequel to What America Needs 1994. The filmmaker will travel from Manhattan to San Francisco asking people the question, What do you think America needs?

KIMBERLY WOOD received funding for On My Knees, a narrative film that creates a portrait of Victorian maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick, drawing from 17 years of her diaries. Themes of class, race, and gender are explored vis--vis Cullwicks relationship to her employer and her upper class secret paramour.

A grant was awarded to SUSAN SHIVA YOONESSI in support of The Classifieds: Vern, a quirky documentary that follows the story of a painter, Vern Koski, who was posthumously immortalized on canvas after a 24-year-old conceptual artist placed a classified ad looking for someone to "donate their ashes to art." Vern's wife (an aspiring actress) Marcia Koski answered the ad and offered the remains of her cremated husband. Never recognized for his art during his life, ironically, Vern Koski became "his on life's work."

Marina Zurkow was awarded a grant in support of Little Miss NO, an animated adult fairy tale about boundaries, bohemians, and spiritual materialism. Utilizing 1960's graphic design references, jazz fragments, and concepts of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, the project stitches together the family, fantasies and nightmares of a little girl who finds out for herself how to speak up and saynot scream"NO." Little Miss NO is vector animated in Flash, and will be distributed on both the Internet and via TV and festivals.

LINDA BRYANT & LAURA POITRAS received funding for Flag Wars, a cinema verite documentary about the conflicting issues in a working class black neighborhood when white gays and lesbians move into the area.

A grant was awarded to PAUL CHAN in support of Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization, an experimental animated film that reinterprets the drawings of outsider artist Henry Darger and utopian socialist Charles Fourier to explore the Western conception of Utopia.

MAYA CHURI was awarded a grant in support of Forest Grove, a narrative fiction web site that will explore the architecture of storytelling by aligning it with the architecture of manufactured communities. The site will incorporate hyperlink technology, flash, live-action, audio and text to enable the user to explore a more structured environment using an unconventional form.

LISA CRAFTS received funding for The Flooded Playground, a digitally animated fairy tale about a young child living under persistent assault, who gets jolted into a craggy emotional wonderland where he wanders into deep forests and through his inner inferno in a quest to mend his damaged spirit. The visual style is a hybrid technique in which Ms. Crafts scans photographs, drawings, and objects, then digitally manipulates them to create the settings, atmosphere and animation.

LIZA DAVITCH, Minnetonka, MN, received support for Victory Square, a contemporary, nonfiction story of Tania and Nastia a close knit mother and daughter living in the former Soviet Republic of Belarus. This documentary explores the mutual dependency and parent/child role switching that occurs within their intense, primal relationship. It also looks into the bond between them through the travails of romantic love, despotism, and other upheavals of life.

Funding was awarded to JIM DE SEVE for Tying the Knot, a sixty to ninety-minute documentary that will explore the personal feelings and social contexts of straight and gay marriages as focused through the lens of de Séve himself, who has played videographer for his family and straight friends weddings. He now turns the camera on his own life as he and his boyfriend plan their marriage.

JAMES DOWELL/JOHN KOLOMVAKIS (previous recipients), were awarded funding for Ned Rorem: Word and Music, a feature-length portrait of Ned Rorem, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer and diarist. Through this engaging man, the viewer will be provided with a window into the music and literary world of the last sixty years. His diaries revealed a sexual candor in this form unseen before. His music has a clarity that has made him a role model for many young composers.

REBECCA FEIG, received funding for STOLEN: The Lost Treasures of Isabella Stewart Gardner, an hour-long documentary film about the largest art heist in American history, which took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The film also pays homage to Isabella Gardner. By including both the past and the present, the film will illuminate the clash of worlds involved in this story, where a living piece of 19th Century Boston is paid a very unwelcome 20th Century visit.

THALIA DRORI, St. Paul, MN, was awarded a grant in support of Toxic Energy: Little Miss Potentiality Returns, a dark feature-length narrative comedy that follows a heroine who fights to save her community from a corrupt mayor.

JUDD EHRLICH was awarded a grant in support of Mayor of the West Side, a complex coming-of-age documentary about Mark Puddington, a teenager born with multiple disabilities, who is a celebrity in his New York neighborhood.

Funding was awarded to ELIZABETH ELSON in support of Born in a Barn, an hour-long documentary that explores the lives of three characters involved in the erotic subculture called Ponyplay and reveals what motivates them to pursue such an unusual pastime.

A grant was awarded to MICHAEL GITLIN for Field Marks, an hour-long experimental nonfiction that explores some attempts to (re)construct nature in the Imaginary, centered on ornithology and the subculture of birding. One section of the film will examine the continuing search for the Ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird now presumed extinct, in order to ask the question: what constitutes proof of a species' extinction? How does one prove a disappearance, a lack? The film will also investigate the aesthetics and culture of natural history specimen collection and the diorama, which rebuilds nature as narrative. the film will posit its own counter-narrative.

Independent media artist EMILY GOLDBERG received funding to attend educational seminars at the annual Independent Feature Project Market in New York. She will meet with distributors, television executives, and publicists who specialize in independent documentary films. Goldberg plans to get an overview of the film industry and business practices and learn how to market her work.