Directory of Sponsored Projects

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.

Hunting in Wartime profiles Tlingit veterans from Hoonah, Alaska who saw combat during the Vietnam War. The veterans talk about surviving trauma, relating to Vietnamese civilians, readjusting to civilian life, and serving a government that systematically oppresses native people. Their stories give an important human face to the combat soldier and show the lasting effects of war on individuals, families and communities. Hunting in Wartime premiered on National PBS last year and won the Big Sky Award at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in Documentary and the Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking Award at the Inwood Film Festival in NYC. The film has so far screened in over twenty-five venues including the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, The National Archives, the American Indian Film Festival, the Hanoi Cinematheque and the Cambodia International Film Festival.

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From 1968 to 1973, the public-television variety show SOUL!, guided by the enigmatic producer and host Ellis Haizlip, offered an unfiltered, uncompromising celebration of black literature, poetry, music, and politics—voices that had few other options for national exposure, and, as a result, found the program an improbable place to call home. The series was among the first to provide expanded images of African Americans on television, shifting the gaze from inner-city poverty and violence to the vibrancy of the Black Arts Movement. With participants’ recollections and a bevy of great archival clips, Mr. SOUL! captures a critical moment in culture whose impact continues to resonate.

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.

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.

The Long View documentary tells the story of the sustained community organizing effort to transform schools in Oakland, California, offering a window into a decade’s worth of learning about the ebbs and flows of change in a community and school district. By following the collective efforts of students, educators, and families, the film shows how grassroots community organizing is a powerful tool for low-income communities and communities of color to rectify inequities in the education system. It provides a window into the challenges facing schools throughout the country, including changing leadership and chronic under-funding, and elevates the power of educators, families, and students to create and sustain a shared vision of student and school success. At an Oakland screening, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond told the audience of parents, educators, community members, and organizers: “I feel so privileged and pleased to be here because this film and all the work that you have been doing for many decades is really a testament to what we should be doing in every community in the country.” Audiences at screenings in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Providence, Denver, and Detroit have been moved by the stories in The Long View. In the challenges and triumphs of Oakland, they see their own struggles to advance education justice. “Your film not only gives voice to education stakeholders who have been unheard in the dialogue around school reform, but also spotlights the inequities that continue to plague our schools.” Liz Davis, President, Washington DC Teachers’ Union

JACINTA (working title) follows a young mother in and out of prison in Maine, while exploring the relationship between trauma and love within a family fractured by a cycle of addiction and incarceration.

Zelma, a free-spirited young girl, bonds with wild cats in the forest, but three Mythology Sirens disapprove and sing a beautiful song instructing her to find a Soul Mate and marry. In school, Zelma's feral nature does not sit well with her classmates: "She is not a girl," they chant. Zelma feels a zap and has an instant crush on one of them - her Soul Mate. But the boy ignores her. Under the Sirens' guidance, Zelma transforms herself into a kind of girl that boys like: cute, weak, demurring. But there's a price to pay, so says spunky Biology, who chronicles the neurochemical changes in Zelma's brain as she falls in and out of love. Through her many marriages - both real and imagined - Zelma evolves from fiery girl to domestic abuse victim to a discovery of gender fluidity and self-acceptance. This personal story, set mostly in the Soviet Union, explores how love and gender roles are shaped by the clash of an individual's biology with the stereotypes and mythologies of their cultures.

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.

As human beings, we all face the same catch-22: Prompted by a natural defense mechanism, we’re all afraid of those who are different, but ironically, we’re also all scared of being rejected for being different. No one knows this better than Larry, a man who was born with hypertrichosis, an extremely rare condition that has him completely covered by thick hair. But even though the other members of his family with the condition taught him to hide behind masks, Larry chose from a very early age to celebrate being different and used his unique physicality to join the circus so he could help his impoverished family. His quest for a better life led him to build a business and a new family in the U.S., bringing new challenges that will blend into one another to bring this man who has always been passionate about empowering those who feel different to a personal crossroad: Pressured by his wife, he’ll have to decide whether to risk having a child who could inherit his condition while he struggles with the country’s growing fear of immigrants and a sudden risk of deportation that will bring up his anxiety about going back to a country that now feels foreign to him to confront his family’s depression about their condition, which he thought he’d left behind. Through this personal journey, Larry, the epitome of being different, will discover whether it is truly possible for him and others to overcome our human fear of otherness.

At the abortion helpline in Philadelphia, counselors arrive each morning to the nonstop ring of calls from women and teens who seek to end a pregnancy but can’t afford to. This short documentary exposes a rigged system and the shocking history of federal policies designed to keep poor women from access to safe abortion. Two timelines draw the viewer into the perilous situation in which a woman can find herself. The clock ticks as the caller races to gather funds to pay even a discounted rate for an abortion before she is pushed into a later and more expensive procedure. At the same time, the counselors at the abortion fund—all called “Lisa”— struggle to stretch a budget to last the week so Friday’s “Lisa” won’t be empty-handed when the phone rings. In 1977, three years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, the Hyde Amendment was enacted with the explicit intention of denying poor individuals—those receiving Medicaid—access to abortion. The film gives voice to those often overlooked in the contentious debate about reproductive justice: the women themselves. The callers, seeking to control their fertility and family size, and the counselors—college students grappling with their capacity to help women in need— flesh out the lived reality of those affected by the Hyde Amendment. Our film is set in Philadelphia, but similar scenes play out across the country where abortion is out of reach for many.

A nuanced look at how two communities of color navigate an uneven criminal justice system, anchored by one polarizing New York City case.

97 year old Holocaust Survivor, Inge Ginsberg, rose to fame as a songwriter for legendary musicians such as Doris Day, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole. DEATH METAL GRANDMA follows Inge Ginsberg’s journey to break out as a performer of death metal music and as she prepares for an America’s Got Talent Audition. The short documentary interweaves the rich personal history of Inge’s life as she attempts to merge her personal lyrics with the contemporary genre of Death Metal.

WOMEN IN BLUE opens in 2017 as Chief Janée Harteau—the Minneapolis Police Department's first female chief and by then five years in office—works to remake her department by getting rid of bad cops, retraining others, and demanding accountability. As part of her reform efforts, she works to recruit more women and promote them within the force into positions of leadership. But in July 2017, when the police shooting of the unarmed white, Australian woman Justine Damond rocks the city and makes international news, Chief Harteau is forced to resign. The new chief—a man of color—restructures the department and promotes only men to his top brass. With reports about racial bias and police brutality in the news daily, the film follows the women of the MPD over 18 months as they fight to not only “protect and serve” the people of Minneapolis, but also restore gender equity to their department. Unprecedented in its point of view and urgently needed, WOMEN IN BLUE is a film about women and policing, but it’s also a film about women in a heavily male-dominated workforce, and the struggles, and difficult choices, that they are forced to confront. It’s as much a Minneapolis story as it is a national one.

In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where director Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counterterrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11, code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.” With unprecedented access, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened and takes the FBI to federal court to compel them to make the records they collected about her community public. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI’s relationship to her community. THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family.

40 years ago, the women of Iceland were sick and tired of being underpaid and undervalued for their work inside and outside the home. “At this time women were doing all the housework,” recalls Gudrun Jonsdottir. “They didn’t have education. They didn’t have daycares. Their salaries were much lower than the salaries of men, IF they had any work. Their names couldn’t even be in the phone book!” So when the U.N. proclaimed 1975 “International Women’s Year” Iceland’s women hatched a bold idea: “What if every woman in the country simply took a day off?” And so, on October 24th, 90% of Iceland’s women walked off the job and out of their homes, refusing to work, cook, or take care of the children from noon to midnight – and the country ground to a halt. Initially derided as a joke by many, the strike transformed the national narrative about women’s place in society. One year later, Iceland passed a law outlawing gender discrimination. Five years later, Iceland elected the world’s first female president. Today, Iceland ranks #1 on the global gender equality index. Our film will bring this inspiring story to life through the memories of the women who were at the heart of it all. We’ll meet these unstoppable characters, portray the opposition they encountered, and discover how they mobilized the entire country at a time when home computers, email and cell phones were nonexistent. The Long Friday is the true story of 12 hours that sparked a revolution.

Audrey Flack holds a unique place in the history of contemporary art in America. She has long been a trailblazer, from her early days as an Abstract Expressionist in the 50’s to her successful career as the sole female Photorealist in the 70’s to her monumental public sculptures of recent decades. While she is the first contemporary woman artist to be included in Janson’s History of Art, and her work has been collected by major museums including MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim and the Whitney, she has struggled as an artist and mother of two children, one of whom is severely autistic, to find her rightful place in the art world pantheon. Queen of Hearts explores these twinned narratives of Flack’s life, as she returns to painting after a 36-year hiatus. How did Flack survive, adapt, and emerge as the vibrant, creative, risk-taking artist and teacher she is today? Queen of Hearts follows Flack as she returns to her canvas in anticipation of her first solo show in years. How will Flack’s new work be received by critics in a saturated and youth-oriented art world? What are her lessons for us as an older woman in what is still very much a man’s world? Queen of Hearts is a moving portrait of an artist who is still testing, still experimenting, still searching.