Directory of Sponsored Projects

On April 2016, 700 law enforcement officers swarmed a housing project in the Bronx, arresting 120 people in what federal prosecutors later said was the “largest gang bust in modern New York history.” TROUBLE FIND YOU tells the story of a Kraig Lewis and his family, whose lives were derailed by this bust and Lewis's subsequent prosecution. The film explores the difficulty of living as a black man in America whose community is highly surveilled and whose friendships and past is weaponized against him.

Each morning we slather with 1000’s of chemicals hidden inside cosmetics and personal care products, many of which are toxic. In the United States, the Cosmetic and Personal Care Industry regulates itself. Links to hormonal disruption in baby boys, developmental delays, low sperm count in men. Infertility, cancer, diabetes, obesity and skin disease - the cosmetic industry isn’t pretty. Top researchers worldwide have the hard science to answer the question ‘Are cosmetics and personal care products making us sick?’

A TOWERING TASK: THE STORY OF THE PEACE CORPS is a feature documentary covering the almost 60-year history of the agency. From the Peace Corps' founding under JFK, through the eras of the Vietnam War and the Reagan administration when the agency was nearly undone, to today's existence at the forefront of some of the most pressing themes facing the global community while being nearly forgotten by the American public, A Towering Task takes viewers on a journey of what it means to be a global citizen. Historians, journalists, former staff and volunteers, and host country nationals come together to shine a light on this uniquely American agency as it has evolved through its history. Notable interviewees include President Jimmy Carter, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Representatives Donna Shalala, Joe Kennedy, and John Garamendi, as well as Peace Corps founders Harris Wofford and Bill Josephson. National and international distribution is planned through community screenings, film festivals, college and university programming, public television broadcast, and, eventually, streaming.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES is a speculative documentary about four people finding a sense of belonging in the New Mexican desert. Based in documentary footage, the film takes place in a near future where people have left Earth to colonize new planets. Set in the small desert town of Truth or Consequences, NM, the film tells the story of the people who stayed. Their journeys open echoes of New Mexico’s complex history of progress and what gets left behind. Through observational footage, archival, and experimental animations, TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES is a lyrical meditation on striving, memory, and finding what we’re looking for in the unlikeliest of places.

TRAVEL NOTES OF A GEECHEE GIRL celebrates the life of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor-- writer, chef, actor and broadcast journalist, whose unconventional life took her from a rural African-American Gullah Geechee community in South Carolina Lowcountry to an international career involving major 20th C intellectual, artistic and social movements. Through her travels and living in New York, Paris and D.C., this six foot Renaissance woman from Bo Peep Crossroads enraptured poets and politicians alike with her humor, wit, stories, cuisine and embrace of life. Julie Dash will draw on her connections to the Gullah culture, powerfully visible in her epic film, Daughters of the Dust. Through a narrative blend of first-person storytelling, archival images and sounds, contemporary landscapes, and dramatic evocations of historical moments, we will travel with Vertamae as she moves with her family to Philadelphia in the 1940s, meets lifelong friends Nina Simone and Charles Fuller, before sailing to Paris in the 1950s. There she joins a diverse circle of artists and activists including Allen Ginsberg, and writes On The Left Bank at The Beat Hotel, marries sculptor Robert Grosvenor, and creates a bohemian life with her daughters after separating. Doubleday publishes her memoir cookbook in 1970. A pioneering television chef on PBS and commentator on NPR, friends like Muhammad Ali and Maya Angelou entreat her for a taste of home cooking. Like her landmark cookbook, Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, recipes for food/living will punctuate this narrative along with locales traversed throughout Vertamae’s remarkable journey.

This Body, Too will be a seventy-minute personal documentary that juxtaposes the perspectives of those closest to me regarding gender and sex as I navigate a bodily decision. Through a diaristic form, I question established notions of femininity and womanhood that many in my family, and our culture, hold as fact. The film will include conversations with my mother, aunts, doctors, and sisters as I attempt to understand and unpack our collective relationship to sex and gender.