A Girl Like Me

Color is more than skin deep for young African-American women struggling to define themselves.

A Girl Named Kai

More About A Girl Named Kai from Director Kai Ling Xue  Three years in the making, shot…
Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

As We Sleep

More About As We Sleep In the summer of 2002, Marcie Lotzgeselles’ parents welcomed documentary filmmaker Elizabeth…
Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Burning Barriers

The Department Of Education

Many people consider the word Firefighter synonymous with Fireman. Most see no reason not to regard the two as equivalent. But hidden throughout in New York City lies the counter-argument. Reacting to the discovery during our research of the social injustices that female firefighters had to face, our team set out to find the women who dared to go against the norm and to tell their story. As we began to meet these workplace pioneers, a story of courage and persistence in the face of prejudice started to blossom. What we uncovered was surprising, perturbing, but for the most part, exhilarating. Female firefighters have been protecting homes and saving lives for thirty years but continue to remain in the shadows of their male colleagues. BURNING BARRIERS aims to highlight the struggle of these brave women to gain acceptance inside the firehouse as well as in their communities and families. As filmmakers, we were able to bring some attention to an important and troubling issue: the history of gender discrimination and its ongoing role in women’s lives.

Denied

Filmmaker
Julie Winokur

When I met Sheila Wessenberg, she was living the American nightmare.

She had a potentially fatal illness, but because she was uninsured her life seemed expendable.

She said to me, “There is no reason why anyone should be shoved into homelessness and helplessness just to live.” She was referring to the fact that she could only get publicly funded health care if she gave up her home and her car. In the meantime, her doctor had abandoned her and she had already gone seven months with no chemotherapy.

I was so horrified by the real-life cost of poor public policy that I became obsessed with all the ‘Sheilas’ whose lives were on the line. I realized Sheila could be any one of us—could even be me. I wanted to shout from the highest rafter that she was being dealt one of the greatest injustices I had witnessed in the 20 years I’d been a journalist. 

We first published Shelia’s story in The New York Times Magazine. Readers were so shocked by her suffering that they donated over $50,000 in order to help the family stay afloat. Next, we published Sheila’s story in a book and exhibition called Denied, which was shared on Capitol Hill and toured to state capitols across the country.

But our work wasn’t done because U.S. health care policy hadn’t budged an inch. We decided we had to tell Sheila’s story in film so even more people could see the shocking truth. Considering the raging debate on health care reform in Washington now, inclusion in the Media That Matters Film Festival couldn’t be more relevant or more urgent.

Diana

More About Diana from Director Brynmore Williams We were approached by MTV to help create a documentary…
Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

I’m Not a Boy

More About I’m Not a Boy from Producer Listen Up! Beyond Borders: Personal Stories from a Small…
Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

I’m Just Anneke

Filmmaker Jonathan Skurnik

I’m Just Anneke is the first film in a four-part series of short films called The Youth and Gender Media Project designed to educate school communities about transgender and gender nonconforming youth. The first two films in the series are finished and the second two are in production. The completed films are already being used in schools and conferences throughout the U.S. to train administrators, teachers and students about the importance of protecting all children from harassment due to gender identity and expression.

Transgender and gender fluid youth are the most courageous people I have ever met. Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to an oppressive gender binary paradigm, they refuse to do it in order to be true to themselves. I wanted to pay tribute to these courageous young people and to inspire all of us to reconsider our own decisions about gender identity and expression.

Anneke is going into eighth grade in the fall of 2010 and I plan to film her over the course of her first year in high school. This footage will become a feature length documentary about Anneke’s life as she starts to take testosterone and begins a slow and thoughtful transition to fully embody her own unique gender identity.

In the Morning

More About In The Morning from Director Danielle Lurie When a young Turkish woman, Derya, 15, is…
Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Knock Knock, Who’s There?

More about Knock Knock, Who’s There? from Breakthrough Part of a larger Bell Bajao or Ring the…
Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!

Filmmaker Gus Andrews

The Media Show is a YouTube channel series staring puppets Weena and Erna, two high-school-aged sisters skipping school to spend time making their own videos in an abandoned storage closet in an advertising agency in New York City. The show’s model of media literacy aims to reconcile the exuberance of fan-created media with a critique of ad-driven corporate media.

In this episode of The Media Show, My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!, Weena and Erna happen across a terrible graphics job in Cosmopolitan, leading them to the website Photoshop Disasters, which gets them thinking about other photo manipulation throughout history. Stalin, Hitler, OJ Simpson, Beyoncé—who hasn’t been touched by photo alteration in some way? The girls explore art and propaganda and end up playing with Photoshop themselves, taking control and manipulating their own appearance.

By primarily distributing online, we aim to enter into a dialog about media where young producers, both casual and political, are already displaying and critiquing their work. We hoped this episode might be many things to many people. To viewers on YouTube, it has prompted dialog about whether media can simply be dismissed as “fake” and how photos are involved in the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) community online. To educators, we hope it offers Photoshop Disasters and ad agency websites as potential materials for media literacy lessons, while sparking some new ideas on how to approach the topic. We even hope that this might give ad agency creatives a moment to reflect on the impact of their work.

Novela, Novela

More About Novela, Novela from Director Elizabeth Miller I first met Virginia Lacayo and Amy Bank, Executive…
Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Perversion of Justice

More About Perversion of Justice from Director Melissa Mummert I worked as a chaplain intern at a…
Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Rebel

The Lower East Side Girls Club was founded in 1996 to address the egregious lack of services…
Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Slip of the Tongue

More About Slip Of The Tongue from Director Karen Lum I shot and edited Slip of the…
Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Walking Home

Filmmaker Nuala Cabral

Throughout my 20s I lived in several cities and saw that street harassment was present everywhere. I realized that navigating street harassment is an art. Growing up I would ignore catcalls and other kinds of harassment, but later found myself in spaces where ignoring these behaviors could lead to violence. I found this fascinating and disturbing, and as a filmmaker, I felt compelled to respond. WALKING HOME attempts to question and disrupt the acceptance around these normalized, everyday interactions.

Screening WALKING HOME for young people in high schools, middle schools and community programs has led to some necessary dialogue about street harassment and the issues it brings up, such as self-esteem, gender, sexuality, violence and community.

Creating the film has been a useful tool to generate dialogue on the Internet too. But a film cannot reach everyone. So what next? What happens after the YouTube comments and Facebook conversations? How else can I reach people beyond the classroom, beyond the film showcases and beyond the screen?

Fortunately social media did more than bring WALKING HOME to a wider audience – it connected me to a movement determined to end street harassment and gender-based violence. Exposure to this movement, and the writers, activists, and other filmmakers taking this on, inspired me to take action and engage in my community.

This past March I organized Philadelphia’s efforts for the First Annual International Anti Street Harassment Day. Nearly twenty young people took to the streets to engage our community in dialogue around this issue. Leading up to this event, I adapted the script from WALKING HOME for the stage. WALKING HOME is now part of a larger movement that is calling for an end to street harassment and inspiring communities to care and to act.