Past
Grantees

Barry Kimm, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Meteor", a 15-minute personal documentary film in which the explosion of a meteor in 1875 in rural Iowa is used as a metaphor for the disintegration of a nuclear family.

DARESHA KYI received support for Loosen Knot, Release Me, a one-hour experimental docudrama that will explore how and why many beautiful, talented and intelligent women fall into and pull themselves out of abusive relationships. Using her personal story as the heart of the film, Kyi will create a rich, multilayered tapestry of sound and imagery dealing with the issues involved in domestic violence from personal as well as social, political, spiritual and psychological perspectives. Loosen Knot, Release Me will include elements of poetry and dance. Kyi will collaborate with a choreographer and composer to create musical and visual interpretations of the emotional landscapes the women and she explore.

Michele Lepsche, St. Paul, MN, $6,500. For the production of "Ink Blot", a feature length film in the genre of film noir in which the genders of the archetypal characters have been reversed to a female detective, a female criminal and a male femme-fatale.

Funding was awarded to LANA LIN to produce a 45-minute, 16mm experimental film, Almost the Cocktail Hour, interpreting the life of Jane Bowles, writer, eccentric and wife of writer/composer Paul Bowles. The film will examine the perpetual conflicts that characterized Bowles' life: her contagious sense of humor and consuming despair, her lesbian loves and heterosexual marriage, and her sense of isolation matched equally by a need to affect the outside world. Lin's goal is to make visible the crisis of conflict that paralyzes the individual who struggles with basic affirmation of her own experience. Almost the Cocktail Hour will cross genres, moving from tragedy to comedy, mixing documentary, narrative and non-narrative modes. Bowles' struggles can be read as a metaphor for the filmmaking process-a struggle to communicate a personal vision to the outside world through intricate decision-making.

IOANNIS MOOKAS received a grant for the production of Only Human, a documentary about desire, loss and survival in communities of gay men. This video will examine how the prolonged impact of AIDS on the collective mental health of gay communities affects the ability of uninfected gay men to sustain HIV prevention practices over a lifetime. Only Human is based on carefully composed, disarmingly candid interviews with more than a dozen gay men of different ages, cultural backgrounds and sexual experiences. The oral histories alternate with observational vrit footage and electronically processed metaphoric imagery. Threaded through the video is a fictional narrative that illustrates in dramatic terms several of the issues which the real life subjects address extemporaneously.

Amy S. Ostergaard, Minneapolis, MN, $6,000. For the production of "White Wash", a short narrative film told through the eyes of a young African American girl who hopes to be made white by her baptism so she'll finally "fit" into her adoptive white family.

Funding for The Look of Love: A Gothic Romance, was awarded to SUZIE SILVER. The grant supports an experimental video collage of original and appropriated images and sound, exploring the expression and representation of female desire and sexual pleasure. The Look of Love will delve into the horror as well as the magnificence of intense sexual experiences. Foremost among her concerns in developing this piece is how women's sexual ecstasy is represented cinematically. The video work will take shape narratively in a conventional form, in which Silver critically examines a consciously narrative form that is often viewed as the embodiment of male desire. She will develop the visual look of the tape by layering and collaging original and appropriated footage with computer-generated special effects.

Rafael Viera, Minnetonka, MN, $6,000. For the production of "The Stall", a short narrative film about the struggle to survive mentally and physically the anguish, pain and brutalities of incarceration, to be set in a single prison bathroom stall.

LAURIE WEN received support for Don't Worry, I'm Fine, a 60-minute documentary about her role as a link between two of her closest blood relatives-one living, one dead-about whom she knows almost nothing. Themes of alienation and secrecy, both cultural and personal, are explored through the search for who these women are. Wen will move from the personal to a wider scale, in which exile, secrecy and silence reflect the mentality of many whose cultural heritage is haunted by the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Massacre. Cinema vrit footage of her grandmother's life in Hong Kong today will be juxtaposed with footage of Wen's search for her Aunt Maisy's past.

John Whitehead, St. Paul, MN, $6,000. To produce "Down in the Valley", a 50-minute per-sonal video documentary about the evolution of a small middle-American city, using as a center-piece the recent gang-related murder/suicide of four teenagers in his home-town of Appleton, WI.

Judith Yourman, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Refugee Memories", a video installation work which will explore her family's flight from Warsaw at the outbreak of WW II and their subsequent struggle for assimilation in the US, through the use of interviews, archival footage and home movies.

Karen Me Kyung Muckenhirn, Minneapolis, MN, $3,000 (Encouragement). untitled. A 20-minute autobiographical video essay which will explore an adopted Korean womans struggle with the loss of family and culture and its relationship to the search for her sexuality.

Jo Andres received support for That's It (TO JE TO), an experimental film based on the 1992 journals and drawings of Bosnian visual artist Izeta Gradevic. Gradevic, along with her husband and friends from the Obala Art Centar, was forced to take shelter in the basement theater of the Drama Academy to survive the siege of her hometown, Sarajevo. The film will focus on the woman's interior landscape-her hopes, fears, dreams-interwoven with daily acts of existence. Dreamlike, spectral and mysterious, Andres' work has a distinctive, nonlinear shape that appeals both to the conscious and the subconscious.

Daniel Pierce Bergin, Minneapolis, MN, $4,000 (Production). Mixed Messages. A half-hour narrative film about a biracial man who, reflecting on family and community, realizes that although his race may be mixed, his mind cant be.

David W. Butler, Minneapolis, MN, $2,000 (Completion). Neighbors Mural. Finishing funds for a 26-minute video documentary on youth artists completing the fourth and final panel of the We Claim Our Lives mural, part of the Phillips Neighborhoods Safe Art project.

Adam Cohen received funding to produce Voyage to El Xino, an extended series of filmed image-poems about cities here and abroad. The film will be a portrait of Barcelona's Barrio El Xino, shot as the city implements the last stages of a massive redevelopment plan that is radically altering the character of both this neighborhood and the city center. This portrait will be framed within the context of larger issues of history and urbanism symbolized by the housing projects and urban sprawl on the edge of the city-themselves products of earlier cycles of economic change and displacement.

Cecelia Condit, Milwaukee, WI, $10,000 (Production). Book of Love. A 60-minute videotape, which will weave the violence, capture and escape that has been a recurring in theme in Condit's mothers life into the fairy tale, Rapunzel.

Dennis Darmek, Milwaukee, WI, $4,000 (Production). Gaijin Diary. A 20-minute personal video portrait of contemporary Japan in which Darmek will continue his exploration of cultural dichotomies using his instincts as a documentary street photographer along with his artistic sensibilities.

Laura M. Davis, Minneapolis, MN, $4,500 (Completion). Womens War. For the completion of a 30-minute videotape, made in collaboration with Nigerian artists and village women, on the 1992 reenactment of the 1929 "womens uprising" against British colonial rule.

Mo Donahue, Minneapolis, MN, $6,000 (Completion). Wayward Hearts. For the completion of a feature-length narrative film - a comic look at loneliness in the 70s which explores the lives of three unhappy women who find transcendence from their plight in unconventional ways.