Past
Grantees

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.

Alessandra Zeka/Rob Rapley - T Durosh, a one-hour documentary which examines the recent history of Albania from the perspectives of ordinary people, and of women in particular, focusing on the ways in which historical currents have affected their lives. The film will be divided into three sections. The first section will examine the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, in particular the unique conditions created by his radical social engineering. The second section will relate the events that led to the regime's collapse. The final section will examine the fragile democracy that emerged from the ashes, including the recent collapse of the pyramid schemes and the ensuing crisis.

MO DONAHUE, Minneapolis, MN, $11,500. Donahue received support for Soft Boiled Desire, a 30-minute experimental narrative video exploring the story of a woman who struggles for the courage to free herself and her daughter from an abusive relationship. Through improvisation, Donahue will create and develop characters and scenes which express her thoughts and feelings about perceived reality and the nature of being female in a male dominated world.

MIKE HAZARD, St. Paul, MN, $12,000. Hazard will receive funds to produce a 30-minute video titled Solar Power & Moonshine, composed as an imaginary year in the life of a videopoet named Mediamike. This first-person, narrative video is a montage of light and dark-hearted essays, random notes, chance images, documentary portraits of individuals, and lyrical videopoems.

DEJUNIUS HUGHES, Minneapolis, MN, $14,545. Funds were awarded to hughes to produce Phillips Gateway Documentary, a 30-minute video work on the Phillips Gateway Project, the work of Rafala Green and the youth of the Phillips neighborhood. The Rafala Green public art project, at the intersection of Chicago and Franklin, affirms the neighborhood's determination to make Phillips a safe place for kids and community. hughes will show the breadth of participation in the project, its early history and its larger social context.

JOHN KOLOMVAKIS AND JAMES DOWELL were awarded support for The Worlds of Charles Henri Ford, which will present the life and work of this poet, novelist, photographer, filmmaker and collagist. The work will present Ford as a catalyst and keen observer of the art and literary worlds of New York and Paris for a period of more than 68 years, as well as an important force in creating an honest gay identity.

ALISA LEBOW AND CYNTHIA MADANSKY received support for Treyf, an unorthodox documentary exploring what it means to be Jewish and lesbian on the eve of the 21st Century. Treyf synthesizes the lessons learned by Jews throughout history in order to develop a perspective that revels in the diversity of Jewish communities.

Funding was awarded to JULIE LOKTEV to produce Moment of Impact, a feature-length experimental documentary about the filmmaker's father who was hit by a car and in one instant became a different person, a different being, stuck between life and death. This film will be an intimate expressionistic portrait of her father-then and now. It is also a portrait of her mother, who left her job to care for her husband at home.

SUSAN MUSKA AND GRTA LAFSDTTIR received funding toward a 60 to 90-minute documentary titled The Brandon Teena Story, based on the Humboldt triple murder and how and why it took place, destroying the lives of at least five young people forever, and significantly affecting friends, family and lovers left behind. The themes of homophobia and self-hatred are embedded in this story.

KELLA PRILL, Minneapolis, MN, $12,618. Support was awarded to Prill to produce Freight, a short narrative film about three homeless men who are trying to escape their troubles by hopping a freight train out of town. These three people only want their right to self-determination but instead are shipped around like human freight: out of sight and out of mind.

JEFFREY NOYES SCHER was awarded support for Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, a film about the darker parts of a particularly dark period of the filmmaker's life, cross-cut with the elements of an imagined sort of apocalyptic collective consciousness. It will be filmed as an animation using a variety of techniques including roto-scoping, painting on glass, clay and wire animation, as well as stop motion with objects. The painting will be aggressive in style; and the film personally cathartic and visually arresting.

ERIC TRETBAR, Minneapolis, MN, $15,000. Tretbar will produce Snow, a feature film about a failed guitarist who spends a romantic 24 hours with an ex-punk rock girl around wintry Minneapolis. They briefly relive their carefree earlier days but the journey only reminds them of the present, forcing the guitarist to confront his failure as a musician.

RAFAEL VIERA, Minnetonka, MN, $15,000. Viera will produce a 30-minute drama titled Leaving With Love. This film is the story of a father telling his wife he has AIDS, their initial despair and then re-commitment to their marriage and family. The story ends at Christmas, as the father makes his farewell and his spirit begins to vanish.

Shelli Ainsworth, Minneapolis, MN, $8,000. For the production of "Stay Then Go", a one-hour experimental documentary about her autistic son and her own experience as his mother. The piece will juxtapose "home videos" with short dramatic scenes which describe the experiences of fictional characters in similar predicaments.

TERRY BERKOWITZ was awarded support for an installation dealing with the appropriation of property and belongings from those who have been displaced for political reasons. This is meant to be an evocative work, although it will utilize some documentation and interviews with people who have suffered this experience. It will focus on displacement as a mirror of the 20th Century. The installation will be placed in a gallery as though it were someone's living room, with a soundtrack blending comments culled from interviews with displaced people and information taken from newspapers about current situations around the world, especially examples of mass displacement and appropriation. On two of the chairs, videotapes will be projected. Partially covered photographs will be on the walls, images of occupiers of the house exposed to the viewer.

GREG BORDOWITZ was awarded support for The Suicide, a feature-length film adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's play, which was banned by Stalin in 1932. Bordowitz's film will self-consciously employ the conventions developed for theatrical productions of American television, as well as strategies employed by early television situation comedies. The play was intended to be a critique of the political conditions of Erdman's society in his day; Bordowitz's film brings the themes of The Suicide into a contemporary environment. The themes are exhaustion and despair, the sense of loss accompanied by disillusionment with one's ideals. The scope of the philosophical and political questions proposed in The Suicide range from the responsibilities of the individual to the manner in which state repression compromises the behavior of individuals.

Pamela Colby, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "The Trials of Margaret Randall", a video documentary about activist/photographer/writer Margaret Randall, which will use the voices of the INS judges in Randall's landmark trial to restore her US citizenship, as a narrative frame for a portrait of her life.

SANDI DUBOWSKI received subsidy to produce Trembling Before G-d, an hour-long experimental documentary about Hasidim and Orthodox Jews who come out as gays and lesbians and must abandon their intertwined worlds of family and faith. This is also a story about those who choose to remain Orthodox and how they must constantly negotiate their sexuality and identity in religious communities. The work is structured as a series of journeys depicting the moving and humorous relationships that develop between DuBowski and a Diaspora of exiles. DuBowski returns with each subject to places in their Orthodox past which evoke loss, joy, nostalgia and the turbulence of emotions which derive from being cut off from one's community.

Matt Ehling, Minneapolis, MN, $6,500. To produce "Prairie Downs", an experimental video documentary about the evolution of the suburb, which will juxtapose a documentary about a "gated community" - Bearpath in Eden Prairie - with a narrative taking place in the more "old fashioned" suburb of Brooklyn Center.

Lisa Fisher, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Slash, Burn & Poison", a video documentary about breast cancer, which will consist both of personal testimonies and of political debate over various environmental and medical issues.