Past
Grantees

Kirsten Johnson/Julia Pimsleur - Innocent Until Proven Guilty, a one-hour video documentary about one African-American's struggle with the criminalization of black men in America. The son of prominent civil rights activists, James Foreman, Jr. was raised with the acute awareness of social responsibility. When he completed a law degree at Yale University, Forman was awarded a prestigious Supreme Court clerkship. From that post, he could have gone to any number of highly paid law positions; instead he chose to become a public defender in Washington, DC, where the crime rate is one of the highest in the country. At only 29, he juggles up to a dozen clients at a time, including some of the Public Defender Service's most challenging juvenile cases. This film takes us inside the criminal justice system, tracking Forman's relationship with three of his young clients-one imprisoned one acquitted, and one awaiting trail. Through Forman's experiences and insights as a public defender, the film explores the criminalization of a community and how James Forman lives with its legacy while trying to transform its future.

Funding was awarded to SUSAN KORDA in support of Either/Or, a 60-minute experimental documentary that looks at how the personalities and destinies of a Holocaust survivor's two children were molded by the experiences of their parents.

ERNEST LARSEN was awarded support for Yellow Cab, a point of view Hi-8 video documentary revolving around his re-emergence as a New York City cabdriver. What he's after is the archetypal American story as it is lived today, when you're only another bottom dog (in Edward Dahlberg's memorable phrase) in a tough city, and you know you have to make your way up. He is also after a portrayal of a culture that everybody in the city thinks they see everyday, but don't scarcely get more than the merest glance at; they never see it from the inside. This video will examine work as necessity and obsession, with relentless detailing of the life of the cabbie, the never-ending need to get the next fare, to get rid of that fare as soon as possible so as to find the next one, the brutal competition for fares, the calculations involved in where and when to go, and the nightmare of routine.

T.J. LARSON, Minneapolis, MN, $15,000. Larson received support for Stories from the Bottle, a 90-minute, 16mm narrative about the value of simple human companionship, as reflected through the relationships among various misfits and outcasts at Mickey's Diner.

KATHLEEN LAUGHLIN, Minneapolis, MN, $10,000. Laughlin received support for Reinventing Power: Origins of the Battered Women's Movement, a 58-minute video documentary on the genesis of the women's shelter movement as reflected through the actions of organizations such as Women's Advocates. Interestingly, this enormously empowering phenomenon, which spread throughout the world, began in St. Paul, Minnesota.

JENNY LION, St. Paul, MN, $19,000. Lion received support for Aloha Goodbye, a 30-minute, 16mm experimental documentary that is part faked travelogue and part actual historical investigation, which employs a highly unusual approach to representing political and individual history and memory.

Luca Buvoli - A Guide to Flying, a 15-minute, color, color, 16mm animated film about one of man's most ancient dreams, the dream of flying. In this step-by-step lesson, an unidentified professor instructs his audience to a series of movements of the body which when correctly performed allow one to lift him/herself from the ground and fly without the help of any mechanical device.

MARTI LUFKIN, St. Paul, MN, $3,500. Lufkin received support for An Asian Dance in Minnesota, a five to seven-minute 16mm film on Gamelan dance, a form of traditional dance which is characterized by moving the body, slowly and precisely, with strong emphasis on head and wrist movements. Small gestures take on monumental meaning in Gamelan dance. For example, the movement of one finger can have great cultural significance. Ms. Lufkin will explore the mysteries and beauty of this artistic form of physical expression.

BENI MATIAS, Minneapolis, MN, $10,000. Matias received support for Leaving el Barrio, a one-hour video and Super-8 personal documentary about her 72-year-old mother and her brother's move from New York to a more peaceful setting in suburban Florida. This work will explore themes such as family, culture, class mobility, racism, feminist ideology and the American dream.

A grant was made to EVE-LAURE MOROS and ELIZABETH EMERY in support of Made in Thailand, a 30-minute video documentary about women factory workers in Thailand and their struggle to organize unions in their newly industrialized country.

Julie Murray - Untitled, a 16mm experimental short which will consist of footage the filmmaker will shoot herself along with "found" and archival footage that will be made into a multitude of loops, by sectioning out and splicing end to end shots, or groups of shots, which the filmmaker will combine into multiple overlays within a single film. Spoken and inscribed texts will be used as a narrative vehicle in an associative and non-linear way to render a charged and personal filmic event. Ms. Murray has long been interested in recontextualizing footage from her own and other sources which examines how, through various procedures of isolation, juxtaposition, framing and repetition its logic can be inverted and abstracted and its apparent ordinariness be transformed into a rich poetic and personal landscape.

SARAH PENMAN and MARK ANTHONY ROLO, Minneapolis, MN, $15,000. Penman and Rolo received support for The Great Woodland Indian Mini-Tour, a 30-minute S-VHS documentary about a fast-moving road trip through the Ojibway reservations of Minnesota. At a time when perceptions about Indians are too often shaped by mainstream news coverage of treaty rights issues, and Indian gaming, the real lives of everyday Indians remain invisible. This film will provide a glimpse into some of those lives.

Allison Prete - Lavender Lake, a one-hour documentary about South Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal which, when opened in 1866 was hailed as "one of the shortest and most important waterways in the world." Today it's known as one of the world's dirtiest cesspools and has been dubbed Lavender Lake. To give some idea of how extensive the problem is, local residents say its putrid, perfumed airs are highly recommended for head colds. One hundred-thirty-years of raw sewage, toxic sludge, dumped corpses and drowned dogs later, the community continues to fight to clean up the Gowanus by demanding it be flushed out or filled in. And, they just may win. Prete, who is from the area, chronicles the battle of her fellow community members.

Pola Rapaport - Blind Light, one-hour, color, 16mm mixed genre/experimental narrative about emotional repression and liberation, as well as about vision, light and blindness. Two parallel stories, one real and one fictional; two women drawn in by the same experiences of transformation. Both find their emotional lives re-awakened by their discovery of the Villa San Michele on the Mediterranean Isle of Capri in Italy.

GIDEON SHMORAK was awarded support for An Ocean Apart, a one-hour documentary in two parts (30 minutes each) about fifty African-American and Jewish students from the Frederick Douglas and Stuyvesant high schools in New York, who were united with Palestinian and Israeli students from high schools in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Nazareth. The documentary will follow these students on their journeys to Israel and the United States, where they toured historical sites, visited with families, and took part in leadership and conflict resolution workshops. Through the students' perspectives, the documentary contrasts the Black-Jewish and the Israeli-Arab relations and presents their testimonies of how the Crown Heights riots, the Million Man March, the Palestinian uprising, and the terrorist suicide attacks affected the students' lives. By observing this group of youngsters, the documentary provides a study of how complicated race relations affect young adults when they try to communicate with members of a different race.

NANDINA SIKAND was awarded support for Don't Fence Me In, a twenty-seven minute coming-of-age story of a young woman in post-colonial India. With the use of personal narrative, this documentary will weave together memories, photographs, letters and interviews to create a story of her mother, Krishna Sikund. This will be a retelling of the personal history of Krishna Sikund, who was born in the fall of 1938 and grew up in a country struggling for independence from the British. It was a nation which was just beginning to develop a national identity. This is a personal story told against the backdrop of a political and social context, it is not a historical documentary. It is the story of Krishna Sikund's life, her choices and her personal battles. It is a personal narrative of a life that is poignant and humorous, ironic and passionate. Don't Fence Me In will also look at the parallels between the life of Krishna and her two daughters, who have immigrated to the United States. Ironically, even though both daughters have grown up in different eras, many of the choices they face are the same as their mother's - choices that cut across lines of time and space.

JOE SOLA was awarded support for The Anxiety of the Rented Room, a ten-minute experimental video about anxiety in hotel rooms. Mr. Sola will check into a business hotel in midtown Manhattan for a period of five days. He will not leave the hotel at any time, nor will he have any visitors apart from those that are instrumental to the workings of the hotel. With two video cameras, one surveillance camera and one Hi-8 camera, he will record his daily activities and his relationship to the environment as it deepens over time. The goal of this project is twofold; one intellectual and the other aesthetic. The visual narrative will articulate the attitudes and moods that exist within the mass produced, impersonal objects of the hotel room, ultimately exploring the spiritual void of this space. And aesthetically it will build a new visual vocabulary that uses the colors, patterns and textures of the objects in the hotel room. The mass produced objects of this room survive in a narrow bandwidth of color, density and saturation: Dull brown flowery bedspread, the crushed yellows of the low watt tungsten lights, the hazy white of the marble bathroom tile counter, the garden flower faucet, a lightly braised rust wallpaper, a frail pink lamp, and so on. The list is indefinite.

DEBRA SOLOMON was awarded support for EBP (aka, Everybody's Pregnant), an animated short which examines identity issues related to pregnancy. In the theatre of the body the individual must sacrifice to attain socially accepted goals. The goal for increasing numbers of women is pregnancy. Fertility in the end proves the self and is the final stamp of gender. This film pits the self-negation of infertility against the process of infertility treatment itself.

KIM-CHI TYLER was awarded support for what i remember of her, an intensely personal look into the life of her mother, who was forced into prostitution to support her children during the Vietnam War. It will recount Ms. Tylers memories of seeing her mother have sex with American soldiers, and the emotional prison of her mothers eventual marriage to an American. Visually the film will be shot from the point of view of Ms. Tyler, whose journey begins in America where she talks to people who knew her mother. She will eventually end up in Vietnam, the place of her birth, to visit her biological father and others who were well acquainted with her mother. An old Vietnamese proverb says, Go out one day, come back with a basket full of knowledge. Tyler hopes to achieve this through her quest to know her mother.

RICHARD WORMSER received funding for Behind the Veil, a 30-minute documentary film that will examine the Farmville student strike of 1951, during which a group of African-American high school students rebelled against the inferior conditions of their segregated school.