Past
Grantees

LISA FISHER was awarded a grant for Positive Women, a one-hour documentary exploring the intersection of health, sexuality, and aging as it delves into the complex lives of three older women living with HIV. As their stories unfold over time, preconceptions about older women are challenged, and viewers discover why the incidence rate of HIV infection for the over-fifty population is rising twice as fast as younger adults.

JOSHUA FRANKEL received a grant for Bicycle Messengers, a short film about New York City bicycle messengers in which all the messengers are digitally animated and all the backgrounds and environments are live action footage shot in Midtown Manhattan. By juxtaposing the animated messenger on top of the live action video, the film highlights the peculiar relationship between bicycle messengers and the modern city in which they operate.

INTERMEDIA ARTS OF MINNESOTA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer GERRY GIROUARD, received $9,500 in support of the development of a new evening-length dance work. Intermedia Arts, a community-based arts center, strives to be a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art. It fosters excellence in the creative process and product by presenting diverse cultural perspectives. Inspired by the book Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza De Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina, Girouard will combine his acrobatic dance style with Argentine tango to express the depth and breadth of this tragedy. He will explore the manner in which unwanted memories return, how chance encounters with a child stir suspicions that the child could be one's own grandchild, and how a barren mother could fear being confronted for having taken a child from a murdered mother. Girouard intends to choreograph the convictions, barriers and fears that alienate these two types of parents and their own justifications and conflicts between conscious and biological yearnings.

A grant was awarded to RICHARD HANKIN for Home Front, a feature-length documentary about Sergeant Jeremy Feldbusch, an Army Ranger who was seriously wounded and lost his eyesight in Iraq, as he attempts to readjust to friends, family, community - and most importantly, his new, altered self. The film is also about Feldbusch's family, and how they adjust, reconfigure and cope with events that have forever changed their lives.

SHALINI KANTAYYA was awarded a grant for A Drop of Life, a narrative short about two women, one Indian and the other African-American, and the convergence of their shared struggle to save the world's drinking water. Kantayya seeks to bring awareness to the human dimensions of global water privatization issues and to tell a compelling story about how a few people can make a difference.

JODI KAPLAN received a grant for In The Blood, an experimental short that uses the theatrical platform of a boxing ring and the intense movement of fighting to create a new type of dance. It is about the individual's fight against time, and the brink between life and death.

GREGORY KING was awarded support for Arc Hive (33), an experimental film based on the process of shooting Super-8 film every day for one year. It is a personal cinematic journey exploring time, coincidence, interpretation, and the poetic-spiritual reckoning of chance and circumstance.

A grant was awarded to JOANNA KOHLER for Uppercut Boxing Gym, a documentary based on a North East Minneapolis gym that is giving birth to something historic. Eight women are boxing their way onto the timeline of women's sports and stretching the boundaries of feminism and violence. The first all female amateur boxing team is preparing for the August 2005 Golden Gloves International Competition in St. Louis, Missouri. This film will chronicle their lives as they train and compete.

TERESA KONECHNE was awarded a grant in support of fertile ground: rural women, the diaspora and our changing landscapes, an experimental personal narrative nonfiction video about Konechne's internal/external journey home to capture the lives of South Dakota rural women, and those who have left. Konechne seeks to tell the history of the place, the relationship of its women to the prairie, and the increasingly hostile economics that render farm life all but extinct.

Support was awarded to MARIE LOSIER for The Ontological Cowboy, an experimental portrait of Richard Foreman, the renowned playwright who founded and directs the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church. The film features several interviews with Foreman and performances by Tom Ryder Smith, Jay Smith, and Juliana Francis, who star in Foreman's most recent play, King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe! The work further develops Losier's style of personal documentary portrait filmmaking.

Support was awarded to KAREN COVINGTON for The Price of Memory, a mytho-poetic experimental documentary exploring the movement for slavery reparations in the island of Jamaica. It links the present to the past by exploring how the legacies of slavery still affect present-day Jamaica generations, and why some believe in reparations while others are opposed. The film also examines the filmmaker's search for personal truth growing up in Jamaica.

ALBERT MILGROM received a grant for The Dinkytown Uprising, a documentary that juxtaposes student activist protests against the incursion of a fast-food chain on the University of Minnesota campus called The Red Barn with the macrocosmic anti-Vietnam war protests in the Spring of 1970. The film also aspires to see how attitudes of some participants have changed over time.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal sponsor for composer ANN MILLIKAN, received $8,000 in support of the production of a CD of Millikan's work by the California E.A.R. Unit. The American Composers Forum links communities with composers and performers, encouraging the making, playing and enjoyment of new music. The Forum seeks to provide direct support to composers at every stage of their careers and to develop markets for composers and their music. Composer Ann Millikan will record a CD of her music performed by the California E.A.R. Unit for release on the Innova label of the American Composers Forum. The CD will contain four new works and two composed in 2000 for the E.A.R. Unit, an ensemble comprised of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello.

JILA NIKPAY received a grant in support of Rhythm of Tides, the third in a trilogy of short films that address issues of dislocation, loss and memory. The trilogy is a personal response to the current conditions in Nikpay's country of Iran, and part of a larger body of work of both film and photography. Rhythm of Tides will be a cinematic essay, halfway between narrative and metaphor. Nikpay will combine evocative visual imagery, sound-design, and minimal voice-over into a dense poetic film.

The Directors authorized a grant of $9,000 to INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer MARGO ABDO O'DELL. The mission of Intermedia Arts is to build understanding among people through art. It is a multidisciplinary center offering presentations in visual arts, media arts, performance, and interdisciplinary forms. O'Dell, in collaboration with flamenco dancer and choreographer Colette Marie Illarde and flamenco guitarist and composer Scott Mateo, will present a concert of new work titled Caravan: Cairo to Cordoba, which will expose and examine the artistry of the Arab, Spanish, and Muslim worlds. New works include a duet, titled Let's Talk, for O'Dell and Illarde; a second duet of cultural exploration, titled Danza Andaluza, fusing the classical forms of raks sharki and flamenco; and an experimental piece, titled El Baraka, which means blessing.

A grant to TOMOKO OGUCHI was awarded for Folklore Restaurant, an animated short film that explores the strength of three fox-tales originating from Native American, Finish and Japanese folklore. In all three stories, the fox is associated with fire. Animated characters are created with rare Japanese paper (washi) and sometimes appear on the background of originally filmed aurora borealis.

J.P. OLSEN received support for The Narcotics Farm, a historical documentary about the Federal Government's failed attempt to find a cure for drug addiction between 1935 and 1975. Through experimentation on drug-addicted prisoners at a prison farm in Lexington, Kentucky, this film explores the government's morally questionable research and treatment of prisoners.

BARI PEARLMAN was awarded support for Daughters of Wisdom, a feature-length documentary about the rebuilding and revitalizing of Northeast Tibet through the education and cultivation of women to their fullest potential. Situated on the Eastern Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas, the Nangchen district of Kham (now China's Qinghai Province) is home to an estimated 60,000 subsistence farmers and nomadic herding families. Relegated to subservient roles in their families, the women of Nangchen have for centuries been regarded as simple creatures capable of little more than churning butter, bearing children and saying prayers. A woman in this culture has had to choose between marrying and being a servant to her husband, or becoming a nun, and remaining a servant to her family. But now, for the first time, the women of Nangchen are being given the skills and opportunities to become active participants in preserving Tibetan cultural heritage, improving their local educational infrastructure, and preparing their people to effectively navigate the encroaching modern world. This film will present a vividly intimate portrait of the lives of Nangchen's women.

MARA V. PELECIS received a grant in support of Souvenirs, a feature documentary exploring the suicide of the filmmaker's father, and the lives of other veterans. The work seeks to understand the emotional and spiritual impact of wars on those who fight them.

DANIEL RAGUSSIS received a grant in support of a 30-minute narrative short, titled Haber, which tells the story of one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and the terrible moral dilemma he faced. Fritz Haber was a brilliant German chemist with one of the most extraordinary dual legacies in history. On the one hand, his revolutionary process for creating synthetic fertilizers averted the greatest overpopulation crisis the world has ever known, won him the Nobel Prize in 1918, and now feeds over 2 billion people. On the other hand, he is the father of modern chemical warfare, a dubious accomplishment that resulted in his wife committing suicide.