Directory of Sponsored Projects

As a child of a military family, I am fascinated with military parachutes—a seemingly fragile material that holds the weight of a human body in mid-air. The beauty and the draw of the parachute is the beginning of a look into its creation, its use, and its cultural meaning. It leads me to ask, “Whose hands made this object?” My question sends me on a journey through Ireland and Northern Ireland, unfolding a much larger story than my original inquiry. My search leads me to Margaret, a Northern Irish Protestant who sewed the seams of linen parachutes during the Second World War. I also meet Ruby, a Protestant linen mill worker from Belfast, and then Joan, Elsie, and Eileen, three Irish Catholic soldiers in the British Army (ATS) from Co. Cork, and finally Jane, an Irish Catholic nurse in London from Co. Clare. A story about borders, identity, and cultures in transition, Seams is a complex look at the Anglo-Irish definition of “enemy” and the deep-seated religious, national, and economic divides of two fledgling societies at odds with each other during a global war. The women’s testimonies of the horrors of the Second World War, of the tragedy of the Northern Irish Troubles, and of the slow progression of peace over decades visually unfold through portraiture, archival footage, poetic live-action shots of landscapes and buildings, and hand-drawn stop-motion animation made with tea and ink on Irish linen.

Filmed over five years, FREEDOM FIELDS follows three women and their football team in post-revolution Libya, as the country descends into civil war and the utopian hopes of the Arab Spring begin to fade. Through the eyes of these accidental activists, we see the reality of a country in transition, where the personal stories of love and aspirations collide with History. An intimate film about hope, struggle and sacrifice in a land where dreams seem a luxury. A love letter to sisterhood and the power of team.

Roll Red Roll is a true-crime thriller that goes behind the headlines to uncover the deep-seated and social media-fueled “boys will be boys” culture at the root of high school sexual assault in America. At a pre-season party in small-town Steubenville, Ohio, a heinous crime took place: the assault of a teenage girl by members of the beloved high school football team. What transpired would garner national attention and result in the sentencing of two key offenders. But it was the disturbing social media evidence uncovered by crime blogger Alexandria Goddard that provoked the most powerful questions about the collusion of teen bystanders, teachers, parents and coaches to protect the assailants and discredit the victim. As it painstakingly reconstructs the night of the crime and its aftermath, Roll Red Roll uncovers the ingrained rape culture at the heart of the incident, acting as a cautionary tale about what can happen when teenage social media bullying runs rampant and adults look the other way. The film unflinchingly asks: “Why didn’t anyone stop it?”

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.

The vivid and deeply personal stories at the heart of "Unlocked" have not been heard before. Because of the power and diversity of these stories, we believe Unlocked has the authenticity and breadth of vision to inspire the deep shift in values and attitudes needed to realize a healthcare system rooted in principles of recovery. Accounts are shared from very different perspectives. Former patients, people of lived experience, peers, family members, direct care staff, clinicians, administrators, inmates, law enforcement, and corrections personnel share markedly different realities. Seen together, these varied points of view provide an overview that supports better understanding and open dialogue. Even the most painful stories offer hope. Since the release of "Kings Park" in 2012, we have seen over and over the power of putting a human face on the story of public mental healthcare. The response to our screenings nationwide has been overwhelmingly positive and equally passionate in colleges, hospitals, peer organizations, national conferences, jails, provider settings, and advocacy groups. With the help of a generous grant from The Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care we have completed a project prototype consisting of: • A sample 2-part Video Curriculum which includes including featured videos of personal stories, topic essays and other teaching resources; • A sample Video Library of viewable and searchable clips of uncut documentary scenes and interviews; • Streaming access to the documentary "Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution." We are now seeking funds to complete the digital learning site.

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.

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.

Chicago record store Dusty Groove has been buying vinyl collections for 20 years. But how can one put a price tag on something so personal as another’s music? This is a story about why music matters. How does it shape our lives? Why is it important to us? For the folks that vinyl buyer Rick interacts with, they share the beauty and complexities of their lives as we witness them begin the transition to a new self. Dusty Groove: The Sound of Transition is a collection of intimate narratives, akin to a record album of songs. About love, loss and our deep connection to music.

PICTURE CHARACTER explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world’s newest pictorial language. How do you create a global language on the fly? This film charts the evolution of emoji and investigates what they may reveal about our increasingly technological world.

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.

After suffering 14 years of brutal civil war and the world’s most deadly outbreak of Ebola, Liberia is struggling under the weight of widespread trauma and other mental illnesses. It’s estimated that more than 40 percent of Liberians suffer from PTSD. And those who suffer have nowhere to turn. For a population of more than 4 million, Liberia has just ONE psychiatrist. STILL WE RISE follows three courageous young Liberians – all survivors of the war – as they set out to treat mental illnesses in a country where people who suffer from them are thought to be cursed or witched. Journalist Molly Knight Raskin (formerly of the PBS NewsHour) and filmmaker Ben Niles spent five years documenting their effort, often against unimaginable odds. And when Ebola breaks out, they find themselves on the front-lines of another deadly epidemic – one that threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to build. RISE tackles the urgent, but neglected issue of global mental health head-on. With unprecedented access to the country’s only psychiatric hospital, overcrowded prison and fragile health care centers, the filmmakers offer an unsparing look at this untold story – the challenges faced by developing, post-conflict countries crippled by widespread trauma, depression and other mental illness. A moving combination of investigative journalism and a vérité documentary, STILL WE RISE is ultimately about the resilience of Liberians risking everything to build a better future, and to bring hope to their people.

DAY OF A STRANGER is an intimate portrait of world-renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, during his final years while living as a hermit from 1965 to his untimely death in 1968. Interweaving meditative images of his hermitage nestled deep in the woods of Kentucky and nearly 150 hours of rare audio recordings he made as a hermit, the film pieces together a first-person narrative of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant minds.

A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.

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.

The Super d! Show videos are short form narratives and all the actors are kids with learning disabilities. The style is relatable, the themes are universal, and the kids are instantly likable and seriously funny. The narrative skits “trigger’ discussions about sensitive subjects. Digital & hands-on activities extend learning through participation. The Super d! Show web series target audience is kids age 7-12 years old and supports the growth of essential traits for achievement and well-being of LD kids in this age group.

Funny, touching, and thought-provoking, this visually stunning film is a unique, layered and untold story of an intrepid feminist daughter seeking her late father’s radical artistic spirit with a fresh approach to contemporary issues relating to environmental and technological challenges, and a memorable psychedelic visual collage of style and sound.

PRAY AWAY follows the journey of a group of LGBTQ Christians who claimed to have changed from gay to straight and collectively created, controversially led, and then unexpectedly disavowed the religious right’s conversion therapy or “pray the gay away” movement. One part redemption story, one part anti-hero character study, and one part exposé of the ex-gay world of yesterday and today, PRAY AWAY enters the world of the contemporary movement - still thriving under an effective rebranding - as our protagonists work to disrupt it.

Today, women make up less than one quarter of all those employed in STEM occupations in the United States. These numbers are much worse for women of color: Asian, black women and Latinas made up slightly less than 10% of working scientists and engineers in the United States in 2015. Science is supposed to be built on objectivity, and yet, most researchers agree that these bleak numbers are evidence of deep bias. Over the course of careers, small slights add up to prevent many women from achieving leadership positions in STEM fields. And sometimes, tragically, brilliant women drop out altogether. But now, the terrain is shifting. This film chronicles the groundswell of women scientists who are changing the face of science in the United States and around the world. Using dogged research techniques and careful data collection, these women are not only contributing to our understanding of what keeps women scientists down, but advocating for a more diverse and inclusive future for all. The film will take a novel, collaborative approach to its storytelling, allowing the scientists themselves to guide the narrative of the film. Science is therefore both the subject of the film, and also — through our three main characters — its guiding sensibility, providing viewers a deeper understanding of what it takes to be a scientist. Equal parts insightful and inspiring, this film will illuminate both the hard data and the very human stories of women in science.