Past
Grantees

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.

Springboard for the Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer Karen Sherman, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $24,000 in support of the development and production of a new work titled Soft Goods. The mission of Springboard for the Arts is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the resources they need to make a living and a life. Karen Sherman's work is noted for its visuality, rigor, and wry social commentary. Her adventurous approach to performance and bucking of dance orthodoxy have drawn attention from artists, audiences, and critics across a range of disciplines and aesthetics. Soft Goods is a dance/performance work created in collaboration with an ensemble of technicians and performers. It focuses on the relationship of work to life to loss. It uses dance, manual labor, scripted and improvised text, and the theatricality and choreography of backstage to examine work, aliveness, death, disappearance, and occupational self-obliteration.

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.

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer David Thomson, Brooklyn, New York, received $12,000 in support of the creation and production of a new work, he his own mythical beast. New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry that offers audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation, and active engagement with the social, political, and cultural currents of these times. Thomson’s work exists among the intersections of movement, text, and sound/song, mining the unconscious narratives and underlying structures that drive the experience of both performers and the audience/witnesses. he his own mythical beast (working title) is a multimedia performance work composed of three separate sections that come together in an integrated meditation on race, gender, and sexual identity in American society through the lens of voyeurism. The project incorporates an examination of the artifice and performance of “identity” and the contradictions embedded in these ideas and actions.

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?

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for WORKHAUS PLAYWRIGHTS COLLECTIVE, received $15,000 in support of the creation, development and production of new works by emerging playwrights Trista Baldwin and Alan Berks in its 2015-16 season.  They Want by Alan Berks, a modernization of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, is set in modern times in the home of the Secretary of Defense, amidst a war in Asia many miles away. al-Khatun: Queen of Iraq by Trista Baldwin centers on the extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell, a Victorian-era explorer, archaeologist, writer, and politician, fluent in Arabic and Farsi, and the impact she had on Iraq and the entire Middle East. Workhaus is a collective of Twin Cities playwrights who create a direct relationship with audiences by fully producing original plays under the artistic leadership of the playwright. Since its founding in 2006, it has produced 22 world premieres. Springboard for the Arts is an economic and community development organization for artists and by artists. Its work is about building stronger communities, neighborhoods, and economies.

CHRISTOPHER MAKOTO YOGI received support for a 120-minute narrative called I Was a Simple Man. Part ghost story, part historical memory, I Was Simple Man looks at the life of one man and fractures it into four stories. The film employs a non-traditional film structure to create a unique cinematic experience of a locale many think they know, but actually know very little about: Hawai‘i. Through its four sections, the film covers a wide swath of Hawaiian history: from the verdant sugarcane fields of Pre-WWII O‘ahu to the modern gastropubs of Honolulu, to the coastline countryside, dying and haunted by the supernatural. Masao Matsuyoshi, the central character of the film, has an 85-year-old face that is dark and weathered like damp leather. The creases on his face are deep—valleys detailing decades in the hot Hawai‘i sun. Masao has lived a long life in Hawai‘i Nei, and he is now facing the end of it. He is ready to die. As the regrets of his life weigh down upon him, he must face both the family he’s failed and the ghosts of his past. One by one, Masao’s family members make a pilgrimage to the countryside to care for him in his old plantation home. Through their eyes, we get a full portrait of Masao himself.

SAMEH ZOABI received support for CATCH THE MOON, a feature-length dramatic comedy that tells the story of Halim (25), a young entrepreneur in Gaza who is eager to marry the woman of his dreams, Jasmine (23). Jasmine is by no means an ordinary woman, she is educated and ready to begin a career as a teacher. She is a force in her own right who loves Halim deeply. But the choice to marry Halim is not entirely hers. Her parents have already lost two sons to the conflict with Israel, and are very protective of their only remaining child. They want the best for her, a strong and self-reliant husband, who can also make a good offer. When the time comes to set Jasmine’s dowry, Halim’s father, Issam (55) impulsively promises a new car for his son’s new bride – a Mercedes no less, to be delivered in a couple of weeks. Left to raise his son alone after the death of his wife, Issam’s relationship with Halim lies at the center of the story, and father and son find this relationship tested by the lunacy of trying to find anything, let alone a car, in Gaza during the current Israeli blockade. Halim’s task is a near impossibility. Gaza is sealed from all borders and basic supplies must be smuggled in to meet daily needs. In the end, Halim navigates the many moral and political hazards of life in Gaza and his labor of love leads him into its surreal underbelly—the smugglers’ tunnels connecting Egypt and the Strip. In the terrifying underworld of the tunnels, Halim realizes he is proving himself to his father, his fiancé’s family, and most importantly, to himself.

PRISCILLA ANANY, for Children of the Mountain, a feature-length narrative set in Ghana. Essuman (33), a yam seller and a single parent, gives birth to a child with cleft palate and her first instinct is to run away as she’s accused of causing her child’s “imperfection.” She makes the attempt, but her conscience brings her back and she accepts her fate. Three years later, her son is diagnosed with cerebral palsy which makes him unable to talk, sit or walk like his peers. Determined to find cure for her son, Essuman goes from hospital to hospital until she accepts that the condition is incurable. She gives up on Western medicine and seeks the help of a herbalist, a protestant pastor and a spiritualist. They all either dupe her, take advantage of her or mislead her. The stress of taking care of a disabled child and the criticisms she encounters drives Essuman to drastic measures.

PANGEA WORLD THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for ANICCHA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of FOLD by Pramila Vasudevan. Pangea World Theater illuminates the human condition, celebrates cultural differences, and promotes human rights by creating and presenting international multidisciplinary theater. Founded in 2004, Aniccha Arts serves as a vehicle for the creation and production of Vasudevan’s performance works. Its mission is to use dance and electronic media to interrupt public space and evoke mass response. FOLD will utilize embodied, material, spatial, and sonic performance explorations to illuminate how the simple act of folding is socially and historically rooted, involving uneven power relations among people, communities, and nation states.

CHRIS BOLAN received support for the feature-length A Secret Love that tells the story of a woman and her partner, Pat Henschel. It is a personal love story of a farm girl from the prairies of Canada, who in her early adult years moved to the heartland of America to play professional baseball. Now in her late 80s, Terry has decided with her partner, Pat, to break a sixty-five year secret by coming out as lesbians to friends and family. Terry was a catcher for the Peoria Redwings in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Scouted by Phillip K. Wrigley in 1945, she was drafted for the Redwings in 1946, where she played until the end of that decade. Terry and Pat’s life story is about relationships, commitment and family; today it is also a story about aging, healthcare and acceptance of gays and lesbians in the social fabric of our communities. At a time when same sex marriage legislation is being passed or considered across the country, love stories like this humanize stereotypes, and help viewers understand the risks that people take to live their convictions. As filmmaker Chris Bolan puts it, “These women are the heart of America.”

MICHELLE BROST, Minneapolis, received support for Animal, an animated five-minute work that will be an experiment in form in which Brost will create animal characters with distinctly human-like qualities. The work will be based on the concept that animals are not soulless wards of the human race. Brost will reflect upon many ideas, which will be centralized around the basic question of what is an animal? This question will be explored within the context of primal human instincts that Brost believes people have been conditioned away from in their pursuit of perfection. She also feels the proclivity of humans toward a kind of "godliness" elevates them above other animal forms and perpetuates a false superiority. Animal will be a very intuitive, freeform exercise in visuals and sound composed of random images and ideas that will interrogate the connection between humans and animals.