Directory of Sponsored Projects

ON THE DIVIDE follows a community in McAllen, TX which is adjacent to the U.S./Mexico border, and situated between multiple patrol checkpoints. McAllen is a majority Latinx and undocumented population and is home to the only abortion clinic serving the entire Rio Grande Valley as well as the largest immigrant detention center in the United States and the location of the construction of Trump’s Border wall. ON THE DIVIDE follows the stories of people in McAllen whose lives are directly impacted by these issues that continue to divide their own community and the larger public all around the country. From the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, who could overturn Roe v Wade, to troops being sent to the border to stop the migrant caravan-- activists and citizens on both sides of these debates are emboldened by the political climate, creating further division within the community. Our characters, however, are caught in the crossfire as they contend with their community being torn apart by conservative politics and policies. Our film follows Rey Guerrero, a 60-year-old clinic security guard who has been isolated from his church community, Mercedes Soto, a 35-year-old gang member turned pro-life warrior who has found a new community within the church and, Denisse Gonzalez, a 34-year-old mother of four who previously felt stuck in her role as a housewife but now is a driving activist force in her community where she has finally found her purpose.

Hala, a young Arab woman from a traditional, conservative city in northern Syria, wants to be free and find love. However, while she is chatting with boys on WhatsApp, her family plans to marry her to an IS fighter. Hala flees her family and the IS-occupied city of Manbij, for the Kurdish area of Rojava, on the other side of the Euphrates river. Here she joins the Kurdish women’s police force (Asayiş), where she gets military and ideological training. Central to her new education are the values and goal of women ́s liberation. This includes, also, a rejection of love and marriage. After her education, Hala crosses the river once more, returning to her recently liberated hometown, which the Kurds now have control over. Full of enthusiasm, Hala dedicates herself to her role as a fighter for women’s rights. While Hala, armed with a gun, walks proud and confident across the city and becomes a commander of the women ́s police force, the tension between her and her family grows. She receives menacing letters from her cousins, in which, they threaten to kill her if she doesn’t quit her work for the Kurdish police-force. After one year, the situation escalates. Hala, armed with a Kalashnikov and a grenade, threatens her parents and forcibly liberates her underage sisters from her father. After this action, she gets kicked out of the Asayiş. Now, Hala needs to find a way to manage her life, unprotected, spurned by both her family and the movement.

At the southern edge of Japan, the construction of a new U.S. military base has sharply divided the residents of Okinawa Island, an island dominated by 32 U.S. military facilities. In 2016, a local woman is brutally murdered by an American contractor, igniting tensions that have been brewing since the U.S. occupation began in 1945. In late-2016, Okinawan anti-base activist Hiroji Yamashiro is arrested and thrown into solitary confinement on charges related to protest activities. An indigenous shaman continues to breathe life into the dying traditions of the Ryukyu era, while supporting the conservative, pro-military government. More divided than ever, Okinawans must choose sides during a critical gubernatorial election that will determine the future of the island. A meditation on nature, history and the deep insidious effects of imperialism, Okinawa Documentary carefully examines the complexities of a little-known island that is vital to regional politics.

Ohero:kon - Under the Husk” is a 26-min documentary following the journey of two Mohawk girls as they take part in their traditional passage rites to becoming Mohawk Women. Kaienkwinehtha and Kasennakohe are childhood friends from traditional families living in the Mohawk Community of Akwesasne that straddles the U.S. / Canada border. They both take part in a four- year adolescent passage rites ceremony called Oheró:kon “Under the Husk” that has been revived in their community. This ceremony challenges them spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. It shapes the women they become.

As Palestinian filmmaker Hala Gabriel grew up in America to refugee parents, trying to assimilate into American society, the questions about her birthplace as well as that of her parents became more persistent. The result of those questions is a thirteen-year journey of documentation and discovery, that led to the production of One Night in Tantura, named after her family’s village in Palestine. Hala’s family and former neighbours from Tantura paint a picture of a beautiful village with good relations with their Jewish neighbours which nonetheless was attacked. She confronts the commanders of the Israeli force that occupied Tantura and who candidly admit to killing over seventy people before expelling everyone else. She hears painful stories about massacres, mass graves, and internment camps where her father (aged fifteen at the time) and others found themselves for months at the start of a journey of being stateless which has transcended multiple generations to this day. The Israeli narrative for the establishment of the state conveniently neglects to mention the Palestinian people, to the extent of saying Palestine was a land without people for a people without a land. Through the story told by survivors of one coastal village, this film dispels that narrative.

Sixty years ago, Louis Kelso, a successful San Francisco business attorney, foresaw an American economy throttled by stagnant wages and mounting inequality. His solution was to “take the best of Marxism, namely the goal, and take the best of...the Capitalist system, namely the free market means, put them together and make it work!” It was much in the spirit of the Homestead Acts that granted land to settlers earlier in our history, but instead of land, individuals would acquire income-producing capital, like company stocks and bonds. Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, as Chair of the Senate Finance Committee for two decades, championed the Kelso Plans, giving tax breaks to corporations willing to share ownership with their employees. He wasn’t above (in his words) “using a lump of sugar to get a horse into the barn.” Kelso’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan became federal law in 1975 and since then eighteen laws have been enacted to help the idea evolve, and to include citizens beyond ESOP companies. Its successes and failures received considerable press coverage in the 1980s and 90s, and there were a few frauds against which Kelso spoke out publicly. Today more than 11 million workers have a capital stake in over 7000 ESOP companies, and stock grants are widely used in other companies a few of which will be featured in the documentary.