Past
Grantees

DAVID FIGUEROA received support for Gloom, a narrative short that tackles social class structure by studying the psyche of Lazarus, a driver dealing with his obsession with his late boss’s daughter, Lucia. Along with two other servants, Lazurus is left to run the home of his late boss as Lucia grieves over the loss of her father.  Lazurus has always been a voyeuristic observer of Lucia and dared not go beyond his station in life as her servant. Now things are different. He decides to confront the solitude and frustration that prevented him from pursuing her heart.  Stagnated in the midst of languor, decadence, and nostalgia, the film is about recognizing one’s own solitude and searching for comfort in others.

JENNIFER GRAUSMAN & SAM CULLMAN were awarded funding for ART AND CRAFT, a documentary that uncovers the story of a prolific art forger just as his 30-year con is publicly revealed.  Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.  His impressive body of work covers a wide range of painting styles and periods that includes 15th century icons, the Hudson River School, Picasso, and even Walt Disney Studios. While the copies would certainly fetch impressive sums in the open market, Mark Landis was never in it for the money.  Filmed over an intense transformative period during which his ruse was discovered and his forgeries publicly displayed, ART AND CRAFT combines elements of humor, investigation, confession, and classic observation to uncover one of the most intriguing cases of deception in art history.

STEPHEN GUREWITZ received $15,000 for You Take Care, a comedic drama about Jane and Matt, a young couple pulled apart by life's responsibilities as they transition into adulthood. The fallout leads to the question: How long should we hold on to the past before it’s time to move on? Jane, a baker, and Matt, a customer service representative, are a couple in their mid-twenties living a social, outgoing lifestyle in New York City. All seems well until the city’s demands begin to dwarf their aged relationship. As the two grow apart they distance themselves from the relationship in their own way – both putting up their own façade to give the idea they’ve moved on. Matt buries himself in his creative writing and a series of fruitless relationships.  Jane, on the other hand, makes the more drastic change, by moving across the world, to Hong Kong. She claims the move is signaled by a once in a lifetime opportunity to develop her cooking techniques studying with a master. In reality, she’s a host at an American restaurant in the Central District.  Soon, Matt is visiting Jane in Hong Kong. It’s a trip of murky intentions; are they trying to build a new foundation to their relationship or prove to each other that they’ve both moved on? In a bittersweet ending, Jane and Matt go their separate ways. They move on to new experiences, but are able to credit their relationship together as what helped form the person that each has become. You Take Care is a film about relationships, growing into adulthood, the regret that stems from missed opportunities, and the difficulties of figuring it out.

LASKA JIMSEN received $15,000 for the feature-length documentary essay Deer of North America, which explores the contradictory and mythologized relationships between human beings and deer. The film documents spaces where lines between artificial and natural, domesticated and wild, are blurred. People and deer encounter each other in the context of research, conservation, tourism, facilities management, agriculture, and hunting. From Port Townsend, Washington, where some residents plant deer-friendly gardens in front of their Victorian homes to encourage the packs of white tails to confidently stroll the streets and sidewalks every twilight, to Chicago’s O’Hare airport where a wildlife management team keeps errant bucks from sprinting down runways, our national relationship with deer is paradoxical and complex. This film examines the nuances of those complexities.

ADAM KELEMAN was awarded a grant for Easy Living, a feature-length narrative.  Pulling up to the side of the road, Sherry, a pale-skinned woman wearing a powder blue suit, steps out of her beat-up yellow Chevy and urinates on the gravel beside her.  She pulls up her white underwear and grabs a cigarette from her purse located on the passenger seat. Leaning against the car, she takes a few puffs from the cigarette, observing the passersby on the road.  Thus begins Easy Living, a portrait of a down-and-out makeup saleswoman trying to get her life back on track.  The film utilizes nonfiction strategies within an intimate, fictionalized story arc to provide a nuanced glimpse into the routine obstacles and emotional turmoil of this troubled character.

YUKI KOKUBO was awarded a grant for a documentary entitled Kasamayaki. Set in the rural artists’ community of Kasama, just 90-miles south of the Fukushima nuclear reactors, this is the story of one family’s journey to heal old wounds.  Katsuji and Shigeko, parents of the filmmaker, make their living as potters in Kasama.  They have lived there since the early 1970s, with the exception of several years spent in New York City where they left their daughter Yuki behind at age 16.  Reeling from the disasters, Yuki realizes how far she has drifted from her parents and decides to travel back to Japan to reconnect with her roots and find out why the family fell apart.  Through the camera, Yuki patiently observes her parents in order to better understand them as people and to learn what it means to be Japanese in a time of crisis. 

SHONA MASARIN, received a grant in support of Ghost line, a 16mm experimental film that invokes the spaces of Vaudeville through a Dada/Surrealist eye. The film plays with abstract patterns, rhythms, and alchemical techniques to conjure a lost world. It begins with a vaudevillian preparing to perform for a nonexistent audience. Viewers find themselves in an old theater, shut down and eroding where vaudeville, a relic of the past, has been long forgotten. Summoning this lost history through a non-sequitur that channels multiple characters and personalities, the viewer imagines “lines" of history on a fragile emulsion.

CRYSTAL MOSELLE received funding for The Wolfpack, a documentary that tells the unbelievable story of six teenage brothers who come out of exile and into the world in New York through meeting their first friend.  The six black-clad and long-haired Angulo brothers have been nicknamed “The Wolfpack.”  Bonded by the extreme circumstances of their childhood –– never allowed to leave their tiny family apartment, never allowed to cut their hair, never introduced to the Internet, and almost no contact with the outside world –– they became near-mythical characters.  This is the story behind the myth, of an unusual family locked away from society in the middle of a Manhattan housing project. Dressed like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the over-caffeinated brothers, ranging in age from 13 to 20, eventually display the psychological repercussions of constant reclusion.  This culminates in one brother’s escape from the family apartment while donning the mask of Halloween’s Michael Myers, which results in his admission to a mental hospital. Throughout the documentary, Makunda, the Wolfpack’s 17-year-old alpha brother, takes us on the brothers’ Kafkaesque journey, starting with their personal stories and archival photos found in their dark cave of a home.  We discover the teachers who have carved out their personalities, a mother who firmly believes in home-schooling, and an alcoholic, Yogi father who enforced the boys’ isolation.  And lastly, their television –– loaded with a library of Scorcese and Tarantino –– through which the Angulo boys have found their biggest moral compass. 

VINCENT PEONE and JOSH RUBEN, received a grant in support of The Sea is Blue, a stop-motion animated short that follows the journey of Dina, a girl who falls off her uncle Wolfy’s fishing boat and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. She finds herself in a murky, green, altogether alien world. Saddened by her inability to swim back up to the surface, she begins to cry. It’s then that a group of deep-sea fish hear her cries and surround her. They’ve never seen anything like the glowing blue substance coming from her eyes – her tears. Scared at first, the creatures calm and comfort her. Dina’s unlikely new friends eventually teach her how to swim. Just when she begins to feel at home with these otherworldly friends, an anchor falls – a beacon for Dina to make her way back to her life and her real family. As she leaves, the fish realize that Dina has taught them something – sadness. As Dina is hoisted up to the skies by the anchor of her Uncle’s boat, the fish begin to cry, forever changing the murky green sea into a beautiful blue. Dina is reunited with her uncle, but not without changing the ocean forever.

BENT-JORGEN PERLMUTT received support for Against the Clock, a documentary about car racing.  As Cuba lifts its 50-year ban on car racing, five of its top drag racers prepare their American classics to compete.  The vast changes sweeping Cuba are evident in these drivers’ struggle to gear up for the first official race since the Revolution. From the race’s announcement, through the challenges they face preparing their cars and the obstacles they encounter from the Government, these racers reveal an intimate portrait of life in Cuba today.  The film’s story is told from the perspective of the racers with no narration and few interviews, ultimately allowing the characters to speak for themselves.  Shot mostly hand-held in an observational style, the film will have an intimate, fly-on-the-wall demeanor providing a unique window into a society that could quite possibly be undergoing change. 

ANN PRIM received $10,000 for Notes from There, the third and final story of The Vellum Trilogy. The trilogy is a collection of three fictional vignettes Prim began writing in 2009. Each story takes a brief but intimate look into the lives of gay women: a writer, a painter and dancers. Additionally the trilogy also examines rejection, grief, and transformation. The Jerome Foundation funded Little Words, the first chapter of The Vellum Trilogy in 2010.  Notes from There is a story told elliptically, that utilizes dance physically and metaphorically to reveal a tender love story of separation and the emotional transformation that is possible through creative expression.  In the late 1950s in a small modern dance studio run by German émigré Josette Holger, are two very promising but different dancers. The dancers Pepca and Martine become collaborators and lovers but are suddenly separated by Martine’s arrest by immigration officials.  Martine’s arrest causes Pepca to doubt the value of dance in her life and she begins to withdraw from the world. Martine’s reaction to her own arrest and the abrupt separation from Pepca cause her to transcend her physical confinement and enter into the world of her imagination. Martine creates a dance, which she sends to Pepca through a series of notes and hand drawn images. This dance reflects Martine’s confinement and passion for Pepca. These dance notes become an anchor of reality for Pepca and the path back to rediscovering her language of dance.

CHRIS TEAGUE, received a grant in support of The Woods Are Burning, a feature narrative about Kelly Macomber, a shy, tomboyish teenager looking for a sense of identity and belonging as she approaches a future beyond high school. Kelly’s father, Hank, is a brash but well-meaning single dad who runs a logging crew. He worries that his once close relationship with his only daughter is getting weaker as she grows older. Kelly falls for Foster, a charismatic and mysterious young man who draws her deep into a world of radical environmental activism in Oregon. When Foster abandons her, she goes back to the protective world of her father. But in one last act of radical activism, she sends her life in an unsure direction.

BRENNAN VANCE received $25,000 for The Missing Sun, a feature-length narrative film about two families forced to put their disparate beliefs to the test and to reckon with their clashing cosmologies in the midst of a potential solar catastrophe. Sun explores the crossroads of faith and doubt, love and loneliness, generational differences and apples fallen not-so-far from the tree. The film intimately follows seven characters in their individual searches to not only understand what is happening in their crumbling external worlds but to decipher their shifting internal worlds as well.

JESSICA WALKER was awarded a grant for 366, an experimental film that explores the significance of aging in communities throughout New York City by documenting one birthday celebration for each calendar day of the year.  While exploring variety among the different types of people born at various times of the year, this repeated inquiry establishes a lens on shared customs and common values across demographics.  A strong emphasis will be placed on visual connections that capture the essence of each birthday celebration.  Video and sound will be choreographed through editing into an abstracted, non-linear narrative viewing experience that is 366 minutes in length.  The final viewing format for the project will be influenced by Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho and Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which allow the audience to enter and leave the viewing experience whenever they wish due to the film’s expanded running time.

DEACON WARNER received $15,000 for the feature-length documentary The Co-op Wars. The Twin Cities has by far the largest number of food cooperatives in the country, including several of the largest, forming the basis for an alternative food economy which helped it gain the distinction of the #1 metro area for local food in the nation. According to the filmmaker, this co-op system has contributed to the high level of health and community cohesion in the Cities and has provided a basis for the economic survival of many sustainable family farms in the region.  Many in the food justice movement in other parts of the country look at the Twin Cities’ strong co-op and local food culture with envy, but its accomplishments did not come without struggle. The Twin Cities were the site of the “Co-op Wars” of the mid-1970s, a struggle over issues of class, race, health, ecology and the nature of social change that descended into threats, violent takeovers, and even a car bombing. These issues remain alive for activists of today as they make efforts to create a food system, and a society, that is just, sustainable, and healthy. Through verite footage, interviews, and animation, this film will link “The Co-op Wars” struggle of the past with issues that continue to be wrestled with in the nationwide contemporary food movement today.

JOHN AKRE received support for Demolition Dreaming, a semi-fictional docutoon and meditation on urban renewal and the way Akre feels people have treated their urban history in Minneapolis. It will be an animated film mixed with documentary footage of building demolitions in the city over a ten-year period. The film will focus on a man who saw the buildings of the Minneapolis Gateway district constructed and then demolished. It is about a person who has to cope with a city changing so dramatically around him. It is a story of someone who saw history built and removed and then has to re-create it inside his own head. It is a story about an artist who paints advertising on the sides of buildings, and then, when the buildings are demolished, tries to preserve what is lost by painting the former city on the sides of the remaining buildings, until they too are all smashed down.

KEVIN T. ALLEN received support for Western Ruin, an experimental film that explores tourist performance and historical re-enactment of the American West at two roadside tourist attractions known as 1880 Towns in South Dakota. Interviews will be conducted with the sites founders, historical re-enactors, and tourist performers. These interviews will be combined with footage of historical performance, experimental portraiture of site artifacts and the surrounding Western landscape. The 30-minute film employs methods of archeology and sensory ethnography to excavate traces of the living history of the American West.

NICOLE BRENDING was awarded a grant in support of The Dollhouse, a feature-length experimental animated film using puppetry with custom-made dolls to create a psychological portrait of Junie Spoons. Spoons was a child star whose premature rise to international pop fame and her strained relationship with her abusive mother drives her to insanity by the age of 18. Getting her start on a Star-Search-like program at the age of eleven, sweet and cute Junie Spoons dancing and singing prowess gains the attention of a record label producer who signs her as one of the labels girl groups. Pushed by her narcissistic and controlling mother, and primed by the record producer, her first album Spoonful hits the charts and Junie is suddenly skyrocketed into international stardom by the age of 13. But her rise to fame is not paved with gold. When she tries to rebel against the manipulation that has kept her in line with her mothers self-serving agenda, she is met with the backlash of her mothers wrath. Without any where-with-all or sense of self to free herself from her mothers tyranny, Junie becomes a doll in her mothers dollhouse by her eighteenth birthday.

ANDRES CABALLER0 was awarded a grant in support of El Pastor, a sixty-minute documentary that follows the lives of Latin American sheepherders who come to the United States to work in complete isolation in the American West. Every year, hundreds of guest workers are recruited from South America to work as sheepherders in the United States. Once they arrive, they are dropped off in the deserts and mountain ranges of the American West, where they remain for months in complete isolation, living in trailers and tent, with thousands of sheep, a horse and some dogs. Extreme weather conditions, wild animals and solitude make up the dark side of a profession and primitive lifestyle that can also be romanticized by the beauty of the surrounding environment. The film follows a shepherds life in his homeland of the Chilean Patagonia, his arrival in the U.S., and his journey through different seasons in the desert and mountains of northeast Idaho.

CHRISTINA CHOE received support for 1984 Redux (working title), a personal documentary about Choes journey exploring the nature of propaganda. The film will incorporate elements of animation, performance art, satire, hoaxes/pranksterism, and interviews through the lens of propaganda. The film aims to push the boundaries of fiction and documentary, where the line between performance and reality, lies and truth, are blurred, providing us a meta narrative of how propaganda functions.