Posts in 'Representation in Media'

The 2020 Community Voices Fund grant will support Big Picture Alliance's Via Lux Teen Media program, a youth-led collective that produces films about important stories shaping the lives of young people and engages the public through screenings, broadcasts, social media, and an annual film fest.

This two-year operating grant will support the expansion of BPA's school, summer, and workforce digital filmmaking programs including the launch of “Media Futures,” a paid professional development & leadership program for BIPOC youth seeking careers in film and media.

The 2020 film grant will support "Expanding Sanctuary" as the documentary tells the story of a Latinx immigrant community's successful journey to change immigration legislation and protect families.

The 2020 film grant will support "Dilemma of a Bird in a Mirror," a soft-horror fever dream where a femme's psyche splits as she struggles through societal expectations on the eve of her birthday. This is an approximately 25-minute fiction short film, featuring an all POC (people of color) cast, addressing identity, conformity, disability, mental health, and transformation. Drawing on absurdist theater, existential nihilism, queerness, and their intersections with disability, this film is influenced by the underground aesthetics of filmmakers like Jodorowsky, Lynch, and La Nouvelle Vague experimentation to tell the story of a main character's nervous breakdown and eventual recovery and transformation.

The 2021 Community Voices grant will support "Smile4Kime" as it fosters alternative imaginings, community conversations, and actions around Black women's mental health. This film impact campaign will include screenings, community-led conversations, and an educational/community toolkit.

The 2020 film grant will support "Smile4Kime," a collaborative auto-ethnographic documentary. The film explores the mental health journeys of two women: Kime, an African American woman who lived with dissociative identity disorder after a series of sexual assaults and Elena (the director), a Puerto Rican woman dealing with depression and grief after the death of Kime. The film incorporates interviews, experimental/performance footage, and animation to explore grief, friendship, and intimacy across mental illness, considering important themes of race, gender, and mental health.

The 2021 film grant will support "The Unknown Tales of Lewis and Mary Latimer." This dramatic limited series looks at post Civil War America when African Americans exploded onto the world front and center with their technical innovations, industry, sense of community service, and dedication to democratic values. The story of Lewis Latimer, inventor, designer, engineer, poet, musician, and family man, will serve as a microcosm of Black America.

The 2020 film grant will support "Hold It Down," a music history documentary focusing on the DIY, site-specific characteristics of the West Philadelphia House Music scene from 1998 to 2006. The interactive documentary series engages in a kind of Black digital culture archaeology which collects and reassembles images, videos, sounds, and oral histories from the West Philly House music scene to tell the story of a neighborhood's immense cultural impact across place and era.

The 2020 film grant will support "Childless," a sci-fi/drama feature film about a trans woman who pursues an alternative fertility treatment at a rogue lab in Denmark. While there she uncovers a plot to revive eugenics through gene editing and must fight to save her new son and the universe. Childless not only explores the ethics of science but is deeply committed to illuminating trans motherhood and developing a character arc that moves from a need for biological motherhood to chosen motherhood through adoption. In doing so, the film hopes to create a piece that all women—no matter their background—find relatable.

The 2021 Community Voices grant will support "One Magenta Afternoon." The short film honors the lifeblood of queer people of color, their artistic genius (even in the mundane), to uplift hoodoo/rootwork, and the spiritual power of jazz, and to de- and re-/construct concepts around “Black family.”