Directory of Sponsored Projects

ROCKY FLATS is a feature documentary about an under-the-radar yet crucial environmental story - of the massive amount of nuclear waste left in the American landscape by the Cold War. The film follows events now unfolding in Colorado, where a contentious fight has erupted over the fate of the lands around the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility. Late in 2018, the federal government opened Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, 6,500 acres that once surrounded the most notoriously mismanaged nuclear weapons plant in U.S. history. The government claims that the lands are free of plutonium contamination, but a growing coalition of scientists, citizens, environmental groups, and physicians are vehemently disagreeing. They know that for decades, Rocky Flats leaked radioactive plutonium into the air, soil, and water of surrounding areas - long suspected to be the cause of the high rates of cancer in these communities. While a 1989 FBI raid closed down the plant forever, citizens of Colorado are still fighting to unearth the truth about Rocky Flats - including the lasting impacts it has had on their lands and towns. ROCKY FLATS follows five characters who are leading this fight, and by the end of the year, their efforts will open a Pandora's Box the federal government hoped had closed long ago. ROCKY FLATS is the story of one of the most decisive years in the recent history of our nuclear weapons program, in the process shedding crucial light on one of the most pressing environmental stories of our time.

Syrian clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh considers NYC his home away from home since 2001. He is constantly thinking about the powerful complications of home and identity. Hear, Eat, Home is a story about Kinan and other musicians from the famed Silkroad Ensemble, immigrants from Syria, Japan and Lebanon, defining the meaning of home and identity with music and while preparing native cuisines. The artists are followed in-depth. As they compose, improvise, plan and rehearse, and cook in their kitchen as part of their daily lives, they reveal their personal stories. We’ve observed every artist’s kitchen and documented their story-telling of their family history and beyond while making the food. We have documented many precious moments in the artists’ lives. We followed the tour with Taiko drummer Kaoru Watanabe in Japan in 2017. We also documented the complete rehearsal and performance of “The Sound of Stone” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with visual artist Kevork Mourad, percussionist Shane Shanahan, and other famous musicians from Armenia in 2018. What is home? ​How do you make it? The artists keep exploring their lives and transform their emotions into artistic collaborations with different cultures. It creates a unique and powerful communication. People who experience migration more and less have the feeling of being lost in a new place. In the film, the experience from the artists gives ideas about how they navigate their life journeys. We hope their stories can inspire and comfort people who relate to similar experiences.

In the comedy boom of the late 1990s Rick Scotti was a busy guy—working clubs across the country—when he came to the deadly realization that nothing felt right. At a time when the words gender dysphoria and gender reassignment surgery were rarely heard, Rick’s awakening at age forty-seven led to a year of hormonal treatments, surgery in a small clinic in Canada and a new identity as Julia Scotti. And then the doors shut. Tight. Everyone turned away—former wives, friends, family, comedy world buddies, and most painfully Julia was shut out from contact with the people she most desperately loved – her children. She completely reinvented herself, spent a decade teaching at a junior high, developed a whole new network of friends, and then several years ago, in her early 60’s a friend dared Julia to step back on stage at a comedy club and she began the journey back to the world she loved. And in that same period, her children made contact after fifteen years of total estrangement. This film tracks Julia’s comeback, the rough life on the comedy circuit and the return of her children, who both find their way into the comedy realm. We observe the delicate and sometimes difficult business of re-discovery as comedy becomes a shared language of identity and healing.

Driven to Abstraction unravels a mutating tale of self-delusion, greed, and fraud-- the $80 million forgery scandal that rocked the art world and brought down Knoedler, New York City’s oldest and most venerable gallery. Was the gallery’s esteemed director the victim of a con artist who showed up with an endless treasure trove of previously unseen abstract expressionist masterpieces? Or did she eventually suspect they were fakes, yet continue to sell them for many millions of dollars for fifteen years? Whatever the truth, two women from very different worlds were, wittingly or not, caught up in the greatest hoax ever of Modern American Art.

Seven days after Trump’s inauguration, his Muslim ban was a stunning assault on civil liberties — but more extraordinary still was the ACLU’s counter-attack. Thirty hours after the order was signed, attorneys emerged from a Brooklyn courthouse with fists raised high, triumphant at the court’s first check on the president’s power. This was but the opening salvo in the fight to defend our constitutional rights. The Trump administration has since moved to expel transgender soldiers, roll back voting rights, separate refugees from their children, and force teens to carry unwanted pregnancies. But at each affront, an ACLU lawyer is fighting back. In this modern-day David vs Goliath story, these self-described “freedom nerds” battle an unpredictable adversary with unlimited resources. While the court battles rage, controversy threatens. In Charlottesville, the ACLU’s defense of white supremacists’ right to march — and the ensuing murder of a counter-protester — brings fierce condemnation and inflames a debate around limits on free speech. For nearly a hundred years the ACLU has defended the First Amendment, especially for those with whom they disagree. In today’s polarized political climate, this is difficult political terrain to navigate. THE FIGHT is the inside story of human struggle at a moment of national crisis.

PERSONHOOD tells a different reproductive rights story – one that ripples far beyond the right to choose and into the lives of every pregnant person in America. Tammy Loertscher’s fetus was given an attorney, while the courts denied Tammy her constitutional rights and sent her to jail. Through her story, the film reframes the abortion debate to encompass the growing system of laws that criminalize and police pregnant women. At the intersection of the erosion of women’s rights, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration, Tammy’s experience reveals the dangerous consequences of these little-known laws for American women and families.

The story begins on video game streaming site Twitch.tv, where a competitive subculture is quickly gaining momentum. It’s called “speedrunning,” the art of exploiting every secret and glitch in a game in order to beat it as fast as possible. Perhaps the best and most famous speedrunner is Narcissa Wright. In 2014, she beats “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,” a game that takes ordinary humans around 20 hours to complete, in just over 18 minutes. This world record-setting feat catapults her to stardom and cements her status as a gaming legend. She’s flown to gaming events all over the world, wins the adoration of more than 180,000 followers, and earns $80,000 per year. To the thousands of loyal fans watching from their computer screens, it seems as if speedrunning’s brightest star will never be extinguished. Then, suddenly, at the height of her fame, Narcissa does something unexpected: she stops speedrunning. When she returns, she makes a big announcement: she comes out as a transgender woman. While some fans are supportive, an obsessive group of online haters harass and threaten her. They claim Narcissa is mentally ill and encourage her to commit suicide. Determined to stage a dramatic comeback, she sets her sights on winning back her former fans by setting the world record for the new Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. But when her comeback doesn’t unfold as planned, she begins to question what it really means to feel loved when your entire life is online.

“How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” - Wendell Berry Jarmo, the media project, is an essay film in seven parts. It is a document that shares fragments of human history and experience surrounding a common theme: how we feed (and have fed) ourselves across time. Jarmo, the place, is an archaeological site in Northern Iraq believed to be one of the earliest farming settlements; today residents of adjacent villages eat food imported from abroad. Environmental changes, war, and political turmoil have all but ended the rich agricultural life that characterized Iraq for 10,000 years; by looking to the place where agriculture was born and died, we glean understanding about what is next for our human civilization.

Competitive creative dog grooming is the most colorful competition in America. WELL GROOMED is the fascinating new documentary that captures the hearts, minds and imaginations of the artists involved. Following four champion groomers and their gorgeous, vibrant dogs through a year in the life on the technicolor competition circuit, WELL GROOMED playfully explores their creative process. From South Carolina to California, New York to Arkansas, these women are revolutionizing the age old question—what is art? Director Rebecca Stern has captured a revealing look at pets, families, friendships and the glory of dog grooming through a bright spectrum of color. WELL GROOMED is a crowd-pleasing, family-friendly lm that provides an upbeat look at a unique slice of Americana.

My So-Called Selfish Life chronicles the rise of a growing community of women who don’t want children and who reject the message that a woman’s most important–and most natural–role is to be a mother. Almost half of American women between 15 and 44 have never had children according to 2016 statistics, an all-time high. Yet choosing not to have children is still seen by many as a deviant decision made by the immoral, the unfeminine...the selfish. But beyond the name-calling, the real struggle at the heart of the choice to be childfree is bodily autonomy through reproductive rights, and access to contraception and abortion. It’s also a particularly timely topic given that our media is full of warring headlines about declining populations, on one hand, and unsustainable overpopulation on the other. The film gives voice to a community challenging our most fundamental ideas about female identity, including a 19-year-old student determined to get her tubes tied, a woman “coming out” about her regret at becoming a mother, and a reproductive rights activist whose unsuccessful fertility treatments lead to a life transformation. Through a vivid pop culture tour that spans vintage postcards of storks chasing young women, to the rise of "Instagram moms," the film connects the dots between the cultural forces that push a message of maternal inevitability so ingrained, we no longer notice it. Join us on the front lines of a seismic societal shift about how women control their bodies and their lives.

Marianne takes its name from the national icon of the French Republic which portrays the Goddess of Liberty, to explore the lives of France’s ongoing existential concern: Muslim women and their place in the public sphere. Legislated, judged, and regulated in public spaces French Muslim women are spoken about at length but rarely given the opportunity to speak in the mainstream conversation surrounding feminism, laïcité (France’s version of secularism) and Islam – or any other topic for that matter. Marianne aims to contribute towards the effort to redress this imbalance. It does so with unprecedented access to French Muslim women’s lives from across the country. Seven of these women from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, hijabis/non-hijabis, Muslim-born and converts- open up and allow us to see them in all their vibrancy and nuances. A back-to-the land horticulturalist with an inter-racial family, a “mipster” (Muslim hipster) who shaves her head as a protest to the required removal of her scarf at work, an upper class blonde medical student convert, a public school teacher turned opera singer, a gritty lawyer from the banlieues, a social media influencer, and a once homeless single mother now serving in UK council. Coming from different walks of life, they challenge the dominant French French narrative of a uniform group, defined by oppression and a backwards worldview. Through their respective journeys and points of views, the film questions the concepts of laïcité, universal feminism, liberty, and French identity as they have been defined.

Decades of industrial waste and raw sewage have turned Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal into one of the nation’s most polluted bodies of water. Now on the verge of an EPA Superfund cleanup, but still dangerously contaminated, the neighborhood along its banks is attracting boutique hotels, farm-to-table restaurants, and luxury apartments. Squeezed between two of the borough’s most desirable neighborhoods, Gowanus’s role as a place for manufacturing and a home for working class New Yorkers is changing fast. A graffiti dispatch to new residents sums up the conflict, “Welcome to Venice, Jerko.” GOWANUS CURRENT will ask, Who are the winners and losers in this transformation? Is the neighborhood finally realizing its potential with an injection of money and energy, or is it being hollowed out as its deep-rooted jobs, artists, and residents are forced elsewhere? What do we attach value to in our communities, and what are we willing to give up? Gowanus is a microcosm of the rest of urban America, and what is currently happening here will resonate with people across this country, and even abroad. The film takes a dual approach to immerse the viewer in the neighborhood, layering passages of sensory details with verite scenes featuring the people of Gowanus and their struggles. We want the audience to feel like they are there, imagine what changes to the neighborhood may bring, and consider what is most important in a community.

ALL WE’VE GOT is a feature-length documentary that shines a light on a group long at the center of fights for social justice - LGBTQ women. Often dismissed by their peers, subject to social and economic inequality, and rarely acknowledged in the larger culture, this film tells stories about LGBTQ women’s communities, cultures, and social justice work through a particular lens - the spaces they create, from bars to bookstores to arts and political hubs. And this documentary comes at a time when many of those spaces are closing. Access to space is an epicenter of inequality in the US. Though most people know this issue best when it comes to homes, it also has a dramatic impact on social groups who rely on physical spaces to meet, build connections, and form political alliances. On this journey you’ll meet the couple who recently took ownership of a lesbian bar in Oklahoma City. You’ll see performances by and hear from queer and trans artists carrying on the traditions of a 30-year old queer arts venue in New York City. You’ll sit down with queer Latinas who help run one of the oldest and most politically progressive community organizations in San Antonio, Texas. And you’ll join a table of volunteers, including one of the founders, at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, NY. You’ll hear additional insights from scholar Jen Jack Gieseking, as well as two women who helped shape the Trans Ladies Picnics, social gatherings created by and for trans women.

This is the unveiling of the Mother of Hollywood... In the age of the feminine awakening...

10-year old Furkan is the youngest in his family. His sisters have been in self-inflicted comas for several years, victims of the mysterious resignation syndrome. Traumatized, their minds and bodies simply went to sleep as if in hibernation. The tight-knit family is trying to rebuild a normal life in Sweden, far from their native Kosovo. While their entire future hangs in the balance of a pending asylum request, Furkan tries to build a spaceship in order to escape it all and go live on Mars.

In the ADIOS AMOR, the discovery of forgotten photographs taken over fifty years ago sparks the search for an unsung hero: Maria Moreno, a migrant mother who sacrificed everything but her twelve kids in the passionate pursuit of justice for farmworkers. Haunted by personal tragedy and blessed with a gift for oratory, Maria rolled up her sleeves, collected signatures, and electrified audiences. Chosen by her fellow Mexican American, Okie, Filipino and Black field workers to represent them, Maria became the first farm worker woman in America to be hired as a union organizer. Years before Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta launched the UFW, Maria’s charisma drew crowds, but her outspokenness got her into trouble with labor bosses, who fired her and erased her legacy. The search for Maria guides this documentary, where ghosts fade in and out and magic underpins a rawboned reality. In the end, whose stories get told may hinge on memories, coincidence and—in Maria’s case—an insistence on pursuing a path that touches the lives of others. From California’s great Central Valley, to the Arizona desert and US-Mexico border, the journey yields buried treasure…and stories told with passion and humor. A deeply human drama also comes to life of farmworkers living in dire poverty whose family, faith and working class culture sustained them. ADIOS AMOR—THE SEARCH FOR MARIA MORENO revives the epic saga of a trailblazing woman, while inspiring us to launch our own journeys of discovery into a provocative past.

When was the last time you thought about where your electricity comes from? When a hurricane destroyed your power grid? Or when someone repossessed your streetlights? Do you live next door to a power plant? Are you a visionary early adopter of solar or wind, and creating new businesses that take people into account as well as profit? In a series of vignettes in six locations, “How to Power A City: stories from the front lines of the clean energy revolution” follows a diverse cast fighting to bring clean energy to their communities. Some are fighting extreme challenges like rebuilding after hurricanes. Others are in battles with traditional fossil fuel power. Still others are visionary early adopters of solar and wind power. All shed new light on how we power our cities and homes. In a humanizing insider view of what it takes to get solar, wind, and other types of clean energy into daily use, the diverse cast accepts no excuses as they navigate hurdles of technology, business, and political red tape to realize their visions of a clean energy future.

BeBe Zahara Benet is a drag performer originally from Cameroon in Central Africa, now living in the U.S. She’s magnetic, and 6’3”– before hair and heels. We chart BeBe’s story across 10+ years: from her early amateur days in Minneapolis, to winning ​the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2009, to struggling to make ends meet in New York​. Behind BeBe (the diva) is Marshall (the man). ​The heart of our story takes place one hot and stressful summer in New York City. Marshall feels tremendous pressure to get his career back on track in the face of dwindling opportunities, a shrinking bank account, and the overwhelming competition of over 100+ ​RuPaul’s Drag Race​ queens whose careers have launched since BeBe’s original win. He’s not sure he can afford to keep living in New York, a dream he’d been so proud to achieve. At the height of precariousness and self-doubt, Marshall puts his remaining savings into one last live BeBe show called “Reveal.” As part of his process for “Reveal,” he takes an intense and unconventional acting class about accessing your most authentic self. Even though he lives in the U.S. now, this vulnerable work is particularly challenging for Marshall, coming from Cameroon, where the mere suspicion of homosexuality is grounds for imprisonment. The creative process leads to powerful revelations and shifts, made all the more impactful by the rich context that the film provides around Marshall's history and internal conflicts.