Past
Grantees

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.

HARRIET HIRSHORN (previous recipient), received funding for Pote Mak Sonje: The Raboteau Trial, a documentary that chronicles the trial and eventual conviction of military and paramilitary leaders for their role in the 1994 massacre of civilians in the poor neighborhood of Raboteau in Goniaves, Haiti.

GEORGIA LEE was awarded a grant in support of Marionette, a feature-length narrative that chronicles the struggle of Celine, a young female urbanite, against her material uber-capitalistic life. Along with her eccentric, yet oddly enlightened sister Vish, Celine is drawn into an increasingly fantastical set of adventures that are, at once, macabre and sublime as she struggles to find where she herself belongs.

LYNN LUKKAS, Minneapolis, MN, received funding to support The Oculus Projects: South Africa, an interactive video installation that employs a machine/human interface to read the biological functions of the human body to control the projection of video and sound.

Funding was awarded to AARON MATTHEWS for A Panther in Africa, an in-depth portrait of Pete ONeal, founder of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panthers and an American exile living in Tanzania. It is the story of how a 1960s radical who advocated violence becomes a global activist who advocates community service.

SCOTT MILLER, Minneapolis, MN, received support for Shape of A Shadow, a collection of ten, 2-minute, 16mm shorts presented individually as 2-minute segments and collectively as a 20-minute film. Its an analogous look at the personal travails of Miller, from technophobia to an eventual understanding and union of modern tools and fundamental techniques.

MANOSHI CHITRA NEOGY received funding for Sand Shades, a "cinepoem" that explores the nature of dualities inherent in people as perceived through the eyes of a young Indian woman. The film will interweave the struggles and textures of two contrasting cultures, experienced and lived in one individual.

KRISTEN NUTILE was awarded a grant in support of Secret Mechanisms, an experimental documentary that explores issues of control, anxiety and fear intertwined with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It examines the line between "normal" and "abnormal" behavior through a cinematic poem.

A grant was awarded to RAMN RIVERA-MORET in support of On Calloway Street, a one-hour experimental documentary that tells the stories of a group of immigrants from radically different cultures living in an apartment building in Queens.

MATT RUSKIN received funding for The Warriors, an hour-long documentary about an international group of eco-warriors. In 1997, they began occupying the Glen of the Downs Nature Reserve in Ireland, in an attempt to protect old growth trees that were threatened by a road widening plan.

JEFF SHAMES and JOHNATHAN SKURNIK received funding for Stutter Step, an hour-long documentary about how Shames came to accept and even appreciate his lifetime of stuttering, after a childhood of frustration and shame. With humor and compassion, the filmmaker seeks to understand why he, and people like him, can't talk like everybody else.

RICHARD SHELTON, St. Paul, MN, was awarded a grant in support of The Coonhuntin Stories of Boo Larington, an animated narrative based on the stories of Boo Larington, an Iowa farmer. Larington is a raccoon hunter and mule trader in southern Iowa. He started hunting and trading over 40 years ago and has one of the best reputations in the Midwest. He is a man with history, who is very gifted in the tradition of storytelling. This animated film reveals those gifts.

Funding was awarded to ALONZA RICO SPEIGHT in support of Where Are They Now?, a documentary portrayal of African-American and Black South African young people, now "twenty-somethings", that compares their political and cultural perspectives. This work is a follow-up to an earlier documentary profile of the same individuals when they were teens.

KAREN TAULELLE, St. Paul, MN, received funding to support CARNY, an hour-long documentary on the Stipe family and the fourth generation business that they own in a small Midwestern community. Theyre not so different from other Midwestern families. Theyre large. Theyre Catholic. They could be farmers, but they own a carnival. This is a portrait of a proud family in a business that conjures visions of hucksters, freaks and vagabonds.

MARIE-FRANOISE THEODORE, St. Paul, MN, received support for Rebel in the Soul, an experimental narrative short on the intersection of the lives of two women who have never met. One of them was savagely lynched by a vicious mob and her unborn child cut from her body, and the other a sculptor who became obsessed with the lynching.

MIROSLAVA TURK, Minneapolis, MN, was awarded a grant in support of Wayward Girls, a video documentary which examines the lives of young women caught up in the juvenile justice system, comparing the experiences of girls over the past three decades to those of female youth in the new millennium. At the same time, this project looks closely at the casual relationship of child abuse to (female) juvenile homelessness and delinquency.

ZOE BELOFF (a previous recipient), received funding for Shadow Land or Light From the Other Side, a black and white stereoscopic 16mm film about Elizabeth d'Eperance, a materializing medium who could conjure up full body apparitions.

FRANCOIS BUCHER, received funding for Performance, a two-channel installation that presents a conversation between a married couple. In so doing, the relationship of these two people and their socio/environmental context (over which they have no control) will become a mystery, a fertile ground for analysis.

A grant was awarded to LISA DiLILLO for Tongues Don't Have Bones, a 30-minute experimental documentary journey into Burma (Myanmar), that will look behind the faade of censorship and iron control put into place by the current military regime.

TIRTZA EVEN & BRIAN KARL, received a grant for the production of Far, Along, an experimental documentary that will examine memory traces of World War II as they interpret, rewrite and gradually depart from the constantly evolving present day Germany.