Past
Grantees

RUSSELL HARBAUGH received support for a 100-minute narrative called LOVE AFTER LOVE, a sad, funny, romantic account of a mother and two grown sons as they struggle in the wake of a father’s death. After 4 years of development, the project began shooting in July with actors Chris O'Dowd and Andie MacDowell in the lead roles. Glenn and Suzanne are theater professors at a Midwestern University. They enjoy a playful, tempestuous marriage surrounded by students and family. Their two sons, Nicholas and Chris, have grown up and left the nest, making homes in New York City.  Nick is a successful book editor involved in a long-standing relationship with a colleague, Rebecca, whom the whole family loves, while Chris waits tables, trying to find an outlet for his vague, center-less creativity. When Glenn becomes ill with cancer, the family waits out his last summer days together: caring for his dying body that lies in the living room. Unable and ill-equipped to attend to their mounting emotional needs after Glen's death the family implodes, finding release in alternatively abhorrent and comic ways.

HANNAH JAYANTI received support for an 85-minute documentary entitled Truth or Consequences. In 1950, the residents of a southern New Mexico town, then called Hot Springs, voted to rename themselves after the most popular radio show of the time—Truth or Consequences. In return, the show’s charismatic host would visit once a year, bringing his celebrity friends to the newly burgeoning resort town. Fame and prosperity would inevitably follow, or so they hoped. For a short while the boom seemed imminent, but soon everything returned to how it was before—a small economically depressed desert town. Sixty years later, the same optimism and frustration is playing out as the world’s first commercial Spaceport is being built 20 miles outside of town. Just as the town’s residents are attracted to the remoteness of the desert, so is Spaceport America. Run by the government of New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the country, and funded with tax payer dollars, the spaceport’s landing strip is rented out to private Space Tourism companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X. Through an intimate combination of observational and impressionistic filmmaking, this documentary will paint a portrait of a small town in flux by focusing on the daily lives of its residents. Intertwined with traditional documentary footage will be experimental photogrammetric animations of the landscape and the spaceport. Referencing sci-fi tropes of an impenetrable force affecting the status quo (think Solaris, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact), the animations will dramatize the desert landscape and represent the perceptions that the residents have of the spaceport, both fears of unknown progress and the hope that an outside influence could save the town.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS received support for Mediums, a 45-minute narrative short centered around the jury selection process known as “voir dire.” This process is when a pool of prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and biases before being chosen. In ideal form, it could be described as a trial before the trial to select those who best represent society. The setting of Mediums is the exterior of an upstate New York courthouse, where participants smoke and drink coffee before, during, and after a day of jury selection. While on break, they naturally form groups and alliances and learn from each other. This trade of information and the small dramas of a single day is the focus of the film. As an experimental narrative, Mediums takes literally the definition of voir dire (“to say what is true”), by collaging original dialogue with texts collected from the internet and found in the world, including jury selection pamphlets, automotive manuals, union constitutions, fast food franchise contracts, health insurance primers, blog posts and more. Bits and pieces from these sources are woven into the fictional dialogue as informal quotations (to be acknowledged in the end credits). As such, each juror-character is a sort of “medium” of specific, real-world knowledge. They each possess a unique expertise as well as a problem to be solved. As the day progresses, they trade tips and insight, finding common ground in a show of civic participation extending well beyond—and literally external to—the legal requirement of jury duty.

JOSH KOURY and MYLES KANE received support for Voyeur, a 90-minute documentary that is an exclusive look at a writer's life, legacy, and process as he develops a new book revolving around a mysterious man who spent 30 years secretly spying on people during their most private moments. The documentary examines both the subject's and writer's motivations as the two intertwine: the man is seeking public validation for his actions while the writer works tirelessly to articulate the man's life story. The documentary follows the writer as he culls through decades of research materials, including diaries with detailed descriptions of the events the man witnessed during his years of observation. The film will follow the story through publication and document the public's reaction, finally bringing to light events kept underground for over 40 years.

MELINA LEON received support for a 90-minute narrative called Song Without a Name. Set at the height of the Shining Path's grip on 1980's Perú, Song Without a Name details the bittersweet journey of Georgina Condori, a young girl from the Andes whose baby gets stolen in a fake clinic. After a lot of vain efforts to find help, Georgina arrives at a well-known newspaper where she meets Pedro Campos, a young and lonely journalist who is commissioned to follow the case. The film explores several primary questions: What is the meaning of being socially invisible? What could be in someone’s mind to join a terrorist group? What is the meaning of denying one’s sexual identity? These questions define the lives of the three primary characters: Georgina, who by losing her kid discovers the magnitude of her social invisibility; Leo, who joins Shining Path (a violent Maoist group); and the young journalist Pedro, who lives a double life in his effort to hide his homosexuality. Georgina and Leo are the quintessential representatives of social invisibility; Pedro is clandestine in his own way, because of his hidden sexual identity. And the stolen baby is a symbol of this society of phantoms who became a fading memory from the day she was born. The film will be shot on black and white 16mm film, which is a statement about the sad times in which the story occurs and its total suppression of color.

ANJA MARQUARDT received support for WOLF, an experimental feature about a Native American tracking unit who patrol the southern Arizona border zone, targeting drug and human trafficking. The unit hunts like a wolf pack, analyzing physical evidence (footprints, tracks, threads of clothing, etc.). Their tracking skills have been passed down from generation to generation, recalling ancient beliefs that the trackers walk slowly across the hot desert sand, and where most people would only see sand, dirt, rocks and some small plants, they see a story. Told from the perspective of one tracker in training who must reconcile conflicting narratives before him, this compelling film will be shot entirely on iPhone cameras.

MICHAEL BEACH NICHOLS and CHRISTOPHER K. WALKER received support for Welcome to Leith, a feature-length documentary chronicling the attempted takeover of Leith, a small town in North Dakota, by notorious white supremacist Craig Cobb. Filmed in the days leading up to Cobb's arrest for terrorizing the townspeople of Leith while on an armed patrol with other supremacists, and his subsequent release from jail six months later, the film is an eerie document of American DIY (Do it Yourself) ideals. Welcome to Leith is a fascinating and frequently suspenseful story about race, civil liberties, and freedom in America. That it takes place in the shadow of the biggest oil boom in North Dakota's history makes the film a complex document exploring unforeseen causes and effects. 

MADELEINE OLNEK received support for Wild Nights With Emily, a 90-minute narrative about the secret life of Emily Dickinson. The poet’s persona that has become popularized after her death is that of a reclusive spinster – a lonely woman who never left her room, did not talk to people, and never fell in love. Olnek’s film explores the vivacious, personable side of Dickinson that was recently revealed to have been covered up by her editor, most notably her lifelong romance with another woman. Advances in science have recently allowed scholars to look deeper into Emily Dickinson’s work and find erasures, as well as obvious and major edits to her poems by Mabel Todd, Emily’s self-appointed literary executor after her death. Looking at her letters and poetry without these alterations, Dickenson’s devotion to this other woman is palpable. Emily’s love for her jumps off the page. The woman in question is Susan Gilbert, who met Emily as a teenager and went on to become her sister-in-law, marrying her brother Austin and moving in nextdoor so that they could remain as close as possible. Austin eventually grew unfaithful to Gilbert, entering into a highly public affair with Mabel Todd after the death of his and Susan’s son. It was this affair that drove Mabel’s rivalry with Susan, which led to Mabel taking extraordinary measures to erase Susan from Emily’s poems and letters after Emily’s death. Wild Nights With Emily was originally a play that Olnek wrote and directed. She is now adapting this story for the screen.

RATI ONELI received support for City of the Sun, a feature-length (100-minute) documentary in which three remarkable stories intersect in the half deserted ghost town of Chiatura (located in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia) run by an international mining corporation. Once a leading mining town and paragon of Communist utopian society, Chiatura supplied 60% of the world’s finest manganese during the reign of the Soviet Union. It’s a town that represented a triumphant marriage of human will and technology. In addition to some 35 mines, a leading theater, cultural centers and universities, a spectacular super airway system was built for the town some 60 years ago. To this day, Chiatura is the world’s only city with the largest number of air cable cars used as public transport with the total length of the cableways exceeding 6,000 meters. Running continuously since 1954, never repaired and dangerously outdated, they resemble phantasmagorical floating prisons and are still the main mode of transportation. Here three improbable but true stories intersect: a group of toothless pensioners get together to demand their teeth from the government that extracted them for election campaign purposes a year before; a music teacher turned demolition expert sets out to find the thieves who stole his precious construction metal that he hoped would pay for his son’s asthma treatment; a miner-turned-actor has to make a life-altering choice between sticking with his dream of being in theater or remaining in a miserable life by keeping his job at the mines in order to feed his family; and two malnourished champion athletes have to overcome the odds and win the next Olympic games to survive. City of the Sun is a surreal vision of a post-apocalyptic ghost town and its inhabitants who live in the shadow of an international mining corporation - the most powerful player and the biggest employer in the city.

RAUL O. PAZ PASTRANA received support for the feature-length documentary Border South, which melds Visual Anthropology and Cinema Verite to bring a disarming portrait of the brutal and beautiful journey that is crossing undocumented through Mexico.Border South follows the story of Nicaraguan migrant Gustavo who was shot by railway guards while riding a freight train through the state of Tlaxcala, a 17 year old Honduran girl named Keila who now spends time with young criminals in Palenque, Chiapas after being stranded by her smugglers, and Jason, an anthropologist who finds himself searching for 15 year old Ecuadorian Migrant José Tacuri, who was last seen alive crossing the Arizona desert. Within these stories lies the brutality and intolerance that migrants face as they cross through Mexico, but also the kindness, humor and love for life that migrants must summon in order to attempt one of the most dangerous journeys in the world.

DEEPAK RAUNIYAR received support for White Sun, an 89-minute long drama about life in a Nepali Mountain Village in the wake of a decade-long armed conflict. When his father dies, anti-regime partisan Chandra must travel to his remote mountain village after nearly a decade away. Little Pooja is anxiously awaiting the man she thinks is her father, but she's confused when Chandra arrives with Badri, a young street orphan rumored to be his son. Chandra must face his brother Suraj, who was on the opposing side during the Nepali civil war. The two brothers cannot put aside political feelings while carrying their father's body down the steep mountain path to the river for cremation. Suraj storms off in a rage, leaving Chandra with no other men strong enough to help. Under pressure from the village elders, Chandra must seek help from outside the village to obey the rigid caste and discriminatory gender traditions he fought to eliminate during the war. Chandra searches for a solution in neighboring villages, among the police, guests at a local wedding, and rebel guerrillas.

CARLYE RUBIN and KATIE GREEN received support for the 75-minute documentary 1275 Days. With America incarcerating more of its youth than any other country in the world, 1275 Days explores the complicated juvenile justice system through the personal stories of those entwined within it by following two families 1300 miles apart, with little in common except one thing: both have sons in prison, serving sentences longer than they’ve been alive. This film goes beyond a polemic of the juvenile justice system, documenting the multi-dimensional aspects of these stories and the daily struggles of those they have left behind in the free world, posing questions about ethical dilemmas and accountability when sentencing youth. While the juxtaposition of two different cases poses many interesting questions, ultimately both raise the same fundamental issue: where is our moral compass when we take a child, who has done wrong, from all that he has ever known, to spend his most impressionable years in prison? Children make mistakes, some make bad ones, and while a few could be dangerous, society needs a place to send them, but is that place prison?

STEFANI SAINTONGE received support for Babay, Papa Rose!, a 15-minute narrative short that will be shot on-location in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The film focuses on Tina, 45, who has not seen her father for over 30 years. With her teenage twins in tow, she returns to her birthplace—Haiti—for his funeral. While there, she confronts his “legitimate” children whose fond memories of him are an affront to her abandonment. The film is a piece of a common story in Haiti, where the definition of family is constantly redefined, competing with the western ideal of a nuclear unit and the African tradition of the extended village. Tina has been left out of the village, but she’s not the only one (as the story unveils). The film examines hierarchy in a Haitian family and also explores Haiti’s class-based society.

JAMIE SISLEY received support for the feature-length (80-minute) documentary Farewell Ferris Wheel, that explores the economic benefits and human rights issues associated with bringing legal migrant workers into the U.S. It does this through the lens of the American Carnival. Over the past two centuries, the carnival has been woven into the fabric of the American experience. However, rising expenses and changing domestic labor habits have made it difficult for U.S. carnivals to remain in business. The need for reliable labor coupled with rising overhead has caused employers to find workers outside of U.S. borders. Today, eighty percent of all carnival workers are Mexican citizens who legally travel north for the eight-month carnival season, and then return home. Astonishingly, one third of the workers come from the same small Mexican town – Tlapacoyan, Veracruz. After receiving complaints about abusive work conditions found in industries that use H-2B work visas (the visas used by Mexican carnival workers), the Department of Labor issued new rules that would raise wages and protect H-2B workers from potential exploitation. The carnival industry’s employment recruiter, Jim Judkins, protested that a wage increase would put the carnivals out of business. By hiring a lobbyist and establishing a Political Action Committee (PAC), Judkins and the country’s carnival owners pressured Congress to reject the new wage increases and worker protections. Farewell Ferris Wheel spends six years following the carnival industry’s H-2B struggles through the eyes of Jim Judkins and a carnival owner from Maryland, as well as two carnival workers from Tlapacoyan.

KARINA AGUILERA SKVIRSKY received support for The Perilous Journey of Maria Palacios, a 20-minute black and white experimental film re-enacting one woman’s 1906 journey from the Valle del Chota, the Afro-Ecuadorian region in the state of Imbabura, to the coastal city of Guayaquil. As a teenage Afro-Ecuadorian girl from the Valle del Chota, Skvirsky’s great-grandmother, Maria Rosa Palacios, journeyed to the coastal metropolis of Guayaquil to work as a domestic servant for a wealthy family. She traveled on foot and by mule through the perilous Andean mountains until reaching Guayaquil. For the working class of Ecuador, this story of migration is commonplace. People from the interior of the country often make the journey to metropolitan centers to find employment. What makes Palacio’s story so compelling is that it occurred before the national railway was constructed; more precisely, her journey took place while the railway was being built by a North American engineering team of brothers, John and Archer Harman. The Harman brothers were contracted by the Ecuadorian President, Eloy Alfaro, at the end of nineteenth century. The Perilous Journey of Maria Rosa Palacios examines different aspects of geographic place, historical time, and the nature of the archival document. By telling the story of Maria Rosa Palacios, whose station in society made it impossible for her to be remembered in the history books, Skvirsky will highlight a journey that was both unique (pre-railroad) and utterly commonplace (i.e., a typical journey of migration from country to city) for so many. 

ROSE STARK received support for a 6-minute animated short called All the Pleasures of Youth Will Throb Within You, a cut paper and collage animated film that explores mankind's relationship to technology by traversing the history of the female vibrator. Filmmaker Stark sees the vibrator acting both as a symbol for technology on a large scale and more obviously as an instrument of women’s sexual liberation. The title is drawn from an ad for the first consumer vibrators, which seems highly relevant to our culture today according to Stark, especially as we face the challenges of integrating our bodies and minds with rapidly developing technologies. The film will express the danger of using sexuality as a currency, and the speculated effects this could have on America's pleasure-obsessed consumerist culture. The cut-out characters Stark is developing for the film have many moving parts indicative of machines—a metaphor often used for the human body. She will incorporate photo collage elements of antique and modern advertisements to create a sense of time and place within the film. There will be no dialogue or narration in the film—it will be more like an étude—a study on a specific theme using poetic and metaphorical imagery that will flow with an improvisational energy.

JOHN PAUL SU received support for TOTO, a feature-length comedy/drama set in the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, about a young Filipino bellboy whose determination to attain a U.S. visa precipitates an odyssey of universal import. Undeterred by his lack of education and scant prospects, Toto schemes relentlessly to achieve his goal. When his antics put the lives of his loved ones in danger, he is forced to question the extremity of his actions and to re-evaluate the cost of fulfilling his dreams. In this film, all the characters have dreams and aspirations, be it about love, career, or simply friendship. But how far will one go to reach his dream? TOTO is, on one hand, a satire on the veneration of wealth and celebrity in a society where opportunity and resources are still scarce. It is also an allegory of the immigrant experience in general, seizing upon the luxury hotel where Toto works— with its glamorous classic Hollywood facade — as a symbol of the American Dream, and a persistent reminder of the often treacherous underworld in which that dream resides.

JESSE SWEET received support for City of Joel, a feature-length documentary that chronicles a year in the life of the controversial Hasidic community, Kiryas Joel, New York. To outsiders, it’s a small-town theocracy; to insiders, it’s Judaism’s best hope. Fifty miles north of Manhattan, the Satmar - a sect of ultra-Orthodox Hasidim - are building their version of utopia. Kiryas Joel, New York is one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world, and also one of the most devout. It has the highest birthrate in New York and the state’s lowest median age. The bourgeoning village of 25,000 is a microcosm for some of the most urgent questions surrounding religious life in this country. What is the appeal of fundamentalist communities in the 21st Century? Why are they growing? What fulfillment do they offer their members? At what cost? By journeying into this fervently devout world that has never before been captured on film, City of Joel will create a groundbreaking look at some of the most important questions about the role that faith will play in America in the 21st century.

MUSA SYEED received support for a 90-minute narrative feature called A STRAY. In Minneapolis' "Little Mogadishu", home to one of the largest Somali refugee communities in the world, a troubled young Somali man takes refuge in a mosque, hoping to leave the street life behind him. Alienated from his family and friends, he has a lonely journey ahead of him, until he makes an unlikely—and ungodly—new friend: a stray dog. Nineteen-year-old ADAN knows he deserves better.  Since his mom kicked him out, he took up with the wrong crowd and got wrapped up in the streets of “Little Mogadishu”. But now, in a sincere attempt to reform, he finds solace in the mosque. Working and living as a janitor, Adan hopes to atone and stay out of trouble. When LIBAN, a zealous brother at the mosque, offers Adan a shift driving a taxi, Adan thinks God has answered his prayers: he can finally earn a pure income and stay on the straight and narrow. But his first day on the job, Adan accidentally swipes a stray dog. With shelters closed for the day and guilt weighing him down, he has no choice but to take the mutt in for a night. Adan has nowhere else to go, so he tries to hide the dog on the mosque’s grounds. But Liban discovers the dog, traditionally considered impure in Muslim communities, and he quickly throws Adan and the dog out. The one person that actually wants to hear from Adan is FBI agent Knudsen. Adan has been feeding her basic info on the community’s troubled youth, working as a freelancer for a quick buck. Now Knudsen wants him to become a full-fledged informant. Although he knows the job will mean setting up his friends for a terror sting, he gives in to her promises of a steady paycheck and housing. With the deal struck, Adan can look forward to a warm bed the next day--but for now, he still has to get through the night with this dumb dog. Adan takes the dog to a shelter. As he waits to be called up, he ventures a hand over the dog’s back, petting her for the first time. After last night, he feels they are more alike than different. Could they continue to look for a home—together? A contemporary, vital yet untold story, A STRAY explores what it means to be at home—and what it means to be a stray—in a constantly changing world.

ELIANA UJUETA received support for The Airport Run, a 38-minute narrative short.  Two young inmates – African American Elijah and Caucasian Jake -- became friends in prison. Jake is released early and has set up a job for Elijah, which involves driving for a car service. Elijah has learned his lesson and never wants to be incarcerated again. He plans to work temporarily as a driver so he can help his ailing grandmother and slowly finish college. Jake’s true intention, however, is to get Elijah involved in a criminal heist. Will Elijah become involved in a sinister burglary scheme, or will his instincts be his salvation?