Past
Grantees

DUNCAN SKILES AND MASIE COCHRAN were awarded support for a feature-length documentary titled Still Life. The subject of this documentary, Frank Newmyer, is an evangelical taxidermist whose glory days are behind him as he struggles to create the crowning work of his career. According to filmmakers Skiles and Cochran, there is a cultural backlash against taxidermists in the country. Starting from its earliest stages, taxidermy, outside of the museum, was stigmatized and banished to backrooms, basements, and dusty attics. The cultural backlash against taxidermists is not surprising. Taxidermy is unsettling, first because the process is grisly, but also because it blurs the line between life and death. Dead things that mysteriously come to life-zombies, vampires, ghosts-are frightening. A dead animal posed to look alive embodies the idea of the living dead. However, at the same time, the need to preserve an animal that was lost or destroyed gets at something essentially human. Taxidermy charms death to a halt, if only to suspend it in an eerie half-life. For Frank Newmyer, the subject of Still Life, taxidermy is not a reminder of death-it's an affirmation of life.

WILLIAM SLICHTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received support for The Feathered Ogre, a narrative short based on an Italian folk tale by Italo Calvino, and reinterpreted by Slichter as a modern satire. It will integrate live action with surreal animated paintings to deliver a story of art and political fantasy. The work is centered on a man who seeks a feather from an ogre to heal a king. The man ultimately gains the ogre's wisdom from acquaintances he makes as he sets out on a journey pursuing the feather. The film contains classic themes such as the triumph of good over evil, where the wicked are punished and the brave hero is rewarded for his courageous good deeds with wealth and marriage to a beautiful girl. This revised version of the original story will emerge as a collision of imagery from modern environmental calamities and themes of social injustice, framed against a 12th century Italian story, characters and landscape.

BRYAN C. VUE, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and MONG VANG, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant in support of Skies of Autumn, a feature-length narrative about a Hmong American man named Teng, whose personal journey coping with his imminent death, and the hardships that arise from his terminal illness, lead him to a lake cabin where he can be one with nature and live his life in solitude. While there, he meets Amy, a woman who helps him gain appreciation for his family, find peace within himself, and ultimately conquer his fear of death. The twist to the story is that Tengs journey to the cabin never really took place; it was a spiritual journey to the other side, a concept, deeply felt by Hmong people, which espouses the belief that when a person dies, his or her soul returns to its place of origin and is reunited with ancestral spirits.

REMY WEBER received a grant for a documentary entitled Kiss the Past Goodbye. In 1972, the radiant, hell-bent photographer and filmmaker Daniel Seymour mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia. Seymour was 27 years old and enjoying youth, a bohemian existence and recent artistic success. He had just beaten his addiction to heroin and stood to inherit as much as $30 million from his mother, Isabella Stewart Peabody Gardner, a member of one of Bostons richest families. Traces of Danny are everywhere. Theres an unprinted picture of him taken by renowned photographer Annie Liebovitz on a contact sheet. Theres Danny rolling sound and shooting up with groupies in Robert Franks black market documentary of the l972 Rolling Stones tour, Cocksucker Blues. Scratch the surface a little further theres Danny in his Bowery loft with Yoko Ono and John Lennon shooting their film The Fly. Theres Dannys name in the credits of Larry Clarks groundbreaking monograph, Tulsa. For a number of years, all roads led to Danny; rock n roll, film and art all intersected at his door. In the quest for clues to Dannys disappearance buried within his mysterious wake, Weber has sought out those closest to him, like Paco Grande and his wife at the time, actress Jessica Lange. The elusive Robert Frank, in addition to other well-known artists like Larry Clark and Danny Lyon, is also interviewed.

Support was awarded to GABRIELLE WEISS for The Color of Land, a documentary about John Boyd, the leader of an unassailably good cause, but a leader who almost always loses. A young African American from Virginia, Boyd is one of few black farmers in the country who still owns his land and makes a living from it. He is also the founder of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA), an organization dedicated to fighting for the thousands of African-American farmers who have not been so fortunate as Boyd, and who are now struggling against powerful odds to hold on to their land and their livelihoods. Boyds crusade is about to enter its second decade. He and the other NBFA members brought a class-action suit against the US Department of Agriculture in 1999, claiming the agency had systematically denied black farmers loans while providing ready financial assistance to white ones. Although the USDA admitted to discrimination and agreed to pay each demonstrably wronged farmer $50,000 the victory proved hollow. Thousands of black farmers were shut out of the settlement because they lacked access to USDA documents that would have proved their claims; thousands more simply never received their promised checks in the mail. More bitter still, very few farmers were able to get back their lost land that often had been in their families for generations. This film tells their stories from the perspective of John Boyd.

Jerome Foundation Directors made a grant of $10,800 to YOUNG JEAN LEE THEATER COMPANY, Brooklyn, New York, in support of the creation, development and production of a new experimental work based on Shakespeares King Lear. This work was commissioned by Soho Rep, New York City, and will be written and directed by Young Jean Lee. The work will be an angry love song to fathers, forefathers and patriarchsa thorny and complicated exploration of the ways in which they exert control and influence, and the weird and unexpected ways in which women respond to them. Lees work is geared toward unsettling complacency, both in herself and in her audiences, because she believes that contradiction and uncertainty bring people closer to the truth than pat ideologies.

A grant was awarded to NATALIA ALMADA for a documentary entitled El General. Dictator, iron-man, nun-burner, father of modern Mexico, Natalia Almada's great-grandfather, Plutarco Elias Calles was the president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928. El General is a feature-length film about the conflicting history Almada inherited as the great-granddaughter of one of Mexico's most controversial figures and the socio-economic injustice that has prevailed from the Revolution of 1910 to the present. El General is a journey into the past of Almada's family and an intimate portrait of Mexico then and now.

ANANYA DANCE THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $12,000 in support of the creation and production of the new work Daak, Call to Action. Ananya Dance Theatre, under the direction of Artistic Director Ananya Chatterjea, is a company of women artists of color, diverse in age, race, nationality and sexual orientation, but uniformly committed to artistic excellence and passionate articulation of their dreams, hopes and desires. Choreographer Chatterjea incorporates the sculpturesque forms, strong foot work and emotional articulation of the Odissi classical style, with the purity of line and breath release of yoga, the abstract theatrical potential of Indian ritual practices, and the urgent energy of street theater. Daak responds to the aggressive land rights violations in agricultural communities for the purpose of establishing global industries. The project will share stories of women affected by such violations in Third World communities. The works will articulate the struggle over land rights through the innovative use of space and by imagining different relationships between bodies and land/ground.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer KIMBERLY BARTOSIK, received $8,000 in support of the creation, development, and production of Ecsteriority1&2, a dance in two parts for four performers. In this work, Bartosik explores various kinds of wars, and delves into the deaths and chaos they breed. The work will premiere in the fall of 2008. Bartosik believes in the visceral possibilities of performance and the importance of critical social inquiry. Her choreography is a mixture of movement virtuosity and stripped-down, charged stillness.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, as fiscal sponsor for THE BODYCARTOGRAPHY PROJECT, received a two-year grant of $20,000 in support of the production and touring of 1/2 Life and the creation of the new work Symptom. Intermedia Arts is a multidisciplinary art center that often acts as a fiscal sponsor for independent artists and ensembles. The BodyCartography Project draws from modern dance, contact improvisation and other contemporary movement theories in the creation of work for theater, site-specific locations and dance films. Half Life investigates issues of intimacy, control, geography and science in the context of nuclear threat from three perspectives, the United States as a super power, Japan as an atomic bomb survivor and New Zealand as a nuclear-free zone. The starting place for research and development of Symptom is the exploration of three systems of approaching and knowing about the anatomy of the body. This work will be developed in collaboration with dancers, biologists, neurologists, physicists and somatic practitioners.

Support was awarded to NICOLE BRENDING for an experimental narrative short titled Grandpa, about a small town stripper who gets a call that her grandfather has died, but she must finish her shift dancing for the old men who patronize the club where she works, before allowing herself to experience the overwhelming grief she feels. The film examines the interior world of the young woman who tries to put on an outward smile while attempting and failing to do her job. The impossibility of existing between the worlds of fantasy and reality, in circumstances that blur the two, are the focus of this story.

MICHAEL BROWN received support for 25 To Life, a documentary about a young man named William Brawner, who as a one-year-old received a blood transfusion that left him HIV Positive. Brawner's family cloaked his illness in secrecy, telling no one except close family members. William himself embraced the secrecy of his HIV status well into his adulthood. He even deluded himself about the seriousness of his situation by adopting a promiscuous lifestyle of unprotected sex with many different women. After years of neglecting his illness, William's world is shattered when his doctor tells him he will die soon if he does not change his lifestyle. He reflects on his promiscuous past and decides to confront the realities of his HIV status. With great courage, he chooses to break his silence, tell his past girlfriends about his situation and announce his HIV status on a popular Philadelphia radio station. This film is about his pursuit of redemption and liberation from his dubious past.

MICHAEL COLLINS received a grant for Island Fever: The Case of Paco Larraaga, a documentary feature-length film about how a family driven grassroots campaign to save an innocent man's life culminated in the abolition of the death penalty in the Philippines. Simultaneously a murder mystery and an investigation of the endemic corruption in the post-Marcos era, the film centers on the trial of Paco Larraaga, a Mestizo (meaning of mixed European and Filipino blood) accused of killing two young sisters.

A $9,600 grant was awarded to DANSOLOGY, KOOSIL-JA/DANCEKUMIKO, New York City, to support the presentation of Dance Without Bodies in the iDANS 2008 International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance in Istanbul, Turkey. Dance Without Bodies utilizes a system and a performance technique called live processing to generate movement. The work extracts and dissects the component processes of embodied performance, allowing for a new creative assemblage ripe for digital interface and experimentation. The iDANS Festival supports international exchange and collaboration in the field of contemporary dance and performing arts. The 2008 Festival will explore the experience of time in performance and question the implications of preservation, documentation, historiography and the archive in dance.

ELIZABETH MANDEL and BETH DAVENPORT were awarded support for their documentary film about the tense relationship between a Congolese woman named Rose Mapendo and her daughter Nangabire. In the late 1990s, Rose Mapendo lost her family and home to violence that engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo. She emerged from the suffering as a strong advocate of forgiveness and reconciliation. In a country where politically engineered ethnic violence has created seemingly irreparable rifts among Tutsis, Hutus and other Congolese, this remarkable woman remains a compelling voice in the beleaguered nation's search for peace and harmony. Now, Rose is confronted with a new challenge, teaching one of her most recalcitrant students how to forgive-her own daughter Nangabire. The film tells the harrowing story of this extraordinary woman and her now 17-year-old daughter as they are reunited in the United States after 12 years and a lifetime of sorrow.

LIZA DAVITCH received a grant for Czar of Cinema, a documentary on the life and work of Al Milgrom, founder of the University Film Society and the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival. The 85-year-old Milgrom has devoted more than half his life to bringing obscure films and directors from around the world to Minnesota. He travels each year to international film festivals to find new films, most of which would otherwise not be seen in Minnesota. He is a legend in film circles worldwide, hailed as the Henry Langlois of the Midwest. He is also a cantankerous, grumpy old man. According to his family, these are character traits that began in his youth with the onslaught of Attention Deficit Disorder. The toll that both his onerous character and compulsive commitment to film has had on his family, friends and colleagues will be explored in the film. Czar of Cinema will be an intimate portrait that focuses on three aspects of Milgrom's life: film programmer, filmmaker and father.

Support was awarded to JOHN HERNDON for Autopilot, a 35mm narrative short about tribalism and aggression across generations, transposed and sublimated in American suburban life. In this film, two delinquent adolescent boys, Mark and Luke, destroy bicycles in order to make Internet videos. In turn, their pranks spark a real and tragically violent conflict between their fathers.

RED EYE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for HIJACK, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $10,780 to support the creation of new works. HIJACK is the choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Grant support will subsidize the creation of four new dances, two duets for Van Loon and Wilder, a trio set on the performance collaborative Mad King Thomas and a second trio with Van Loon, Wilder and Scott Heron. HIJACK represents the confluence and clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. It chooses specific inspirations and then investigates those sources, drawing compositional tactics from other genres and grappling with aesthetic, social and political issues.

MAI ISKANDER was awarded a grant for Garbage Dreams, a 75-minute documentary that celebrates the richness, strength and vitality of Egypt's community of indigenous garbage collectors, known as the Zaballeen or garbage people. Recycling 90% of the waste they collect, a rate unheard of in the rest of the world, 60,000 Zaballeen earn the bulk of their living from the sale of recycled material that they have gathered and processed from Cairo's streets. But what will happen to their livelihood and community now that the Egyptian government has hired multinational corporations to collect Cairo's garbage? Focusing on the lives of one teacher and two students at The Plastic Recycling School in Mokattam, Cairo's largest garbage village, this film follows the critical next chapter in the lives of the Zaballeen as they fight to find their place in this new global economy.

A grant was awarded to ANA JOANES for Really Delicious, a documentary that looks at the alternative food movement in the United States. By focusing on solutions to the problems created by the industrial food system, this film will illustrate the far-reaching transformative potential of daily food choices. Really Delicious will follow the personal journey of the filmmaker through the heartland of America in her quest to feel connected to the food she consumes. As she travels, she meets a diverse group of people who educate and inspire her regarding the foods we eat and their impact on our lives.