FESTIVAL NEWS
Fourth Annual Festival Jury
*BARBARA ABRASH, Curator, Teacher and Independent Producer
Since 1993, Barbara Abrash has been Associate Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University. She is also the Associate Director of the newly-established Center for Religion and Media at New York University. Her most recent publication is 9-11 and after: a virtual case book (co-edited with Faye Ginsburg). Other publications include Mediating History (NYU Press, 1992) and a special issue of the media journal Wide Angle (2001) on the work of media activist George Stoney. She has served on the boards of International Film Seminars, Women Make Movies, The Center for Social Media, and several other media organizations, and has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities, Independent Television Service, POV/The American Documentary and others.
*Also on the Jury Subcommittee for Sustainable Agriculture
Alice Blythe is a 14-year-old ninth grader who lives in New York City's Lower East Side. She produced the short film Rebel, an inventive stop-frame live action animation, with 4 other young women from the Lower East Side Girls Club. Rebel was featured at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was an official selection of the third annual Media That Matters Film Festival and screened at the Festival Awards Ceremony where it was presented with the gURL LOOKS BOOK Award. Alice is excited to be a part of this year's jury and she hopes to do more filmmaking and acting in the future.
Dessiree Gordian, 18, attends Global Action Project (G.A.P.) as a documentary, experimental, and narrative video-maker. Motivated and energetic, Des has worked as an assistant facilitator with the A.Y.E. International Collective, represented G.A.P. at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival, and also acted as the Visual Arts Curator for the 2003 Urban Visionaries Film Festival. She is a DJ, visual artist and breakdancer and hopes to travel the world making inspiring films!
DeeDee Halleck is the founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of the Deep Dish Satellite Network. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego and the author of the recent book Hand Held Visions and co-author of Public Television and the Public Interest. She has authored numerous articles in Film Culture, The Independent, Leonardo, Afterimage, Fuse and other media journals. Her films have been featured at the Venice Film Festival, Cannes, the London Film Festival and many other international venues. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Rockefeller Media Fellowships. An early film, The Mural on Our Street (1965) was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2001, she initiated the television version of Democracy Now! (the popular alternative radio show). She has received two lifetime achievement awards: from the Alliance for Community Media and NAMAC (National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture). She is a delegate to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva, 2003 and is co-founder of W$IS? We Seize, a counter event in Geneva.
Sabine Hoffman edited Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity, winner of the 2003 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the Award for Best Cinematography and the John Cassavettes Award for Independent Filmmmaking. She is working on Miller's upcoming feature Rose and the Snake, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Catherine Keener. Other credits include: Morgan Freeman's Desert Blue and Hurricane Streets, winner of the Audience, Best Director and Best Cinematography awards at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival; Alex Sichel's All Over Me, a Teddy Award winner at the Berlin Film Festival; The Day the Ponies Come Back, directed by Jerry Schatzberg; William Jennings' Harlem Aria, winner of Audience Awards at Urban World Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival 2001 and Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival 2002; The Party Is Over directed by Donovon Leitch and Rebecca Chaiklin; and Rodney Evans' Brother to Brother (winner of the Gordon Parks Screenwriting Award 2001 and selected for the 2004 Sundance Dramatic Competition). Sabine is a board member of WERISE and the Woodstock Film Festival.
Lillian Jiménez is the Executive Director of the Latino Educational Media Center which has embarked upon developing a collection of Oral Histories on the Puerto Rican community from the 1950s to the 1980s and is producing/directing a long form documentary, Abriendo Camino: Puerto Ricans and Educational Civil Rights featuring the life and work of visionary Puerto Rican leader Dr. Antonia Pantoja. Ms. Jiménez has worked in the independent film and video field for nearly thirty years. She serves on the boards of the North Star Fund in New York City and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in San Francisco, CA.
Anna Lappé's first book, the national bestselling Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Tarcher/Putnam 2002), co-written with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, chronicles social movements on five continents addressing the root causes of hunger. Anna is co-founder of the Small Planet Fund and an active advisor to a number of non-profit organizations including b-healthy! (Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth) and Dragonfly Media, a network of independent monthlies. She is currently working on Grub: Ideas for an Urban, Organic Kitchen with Bryant Terry.
*Also on the Jury Subcommittee for Sustainable Agriculture
A member of the Selection Committee for the New Directors/New Films festival, which is presented with The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marian is also the chief curator of the New York Video Festival and is on the programming committee of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. She organizes new and retrospective programs, as well as on-going series at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater. Marian is on advisory boards for the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, the Conflict & Resolution program of the Hamptons Film Festival and the NY Expo of Short Film & Video, and is a member of the board of directors of Women Make Movies. She has curated the Festival of Independents in Philadelphia, New American Media Makers at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and has served on juries and panels at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Black Maria Film Festival, NYSCA, and others. She has a B.A. in theater from Marymount Manhattan College and an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University and writes on film and video for various publications.
Michelle Materre's professional background spans more than 20 years experience in the independent film and television industry. She was a founding partner and Vice President of Creative Affairs of KJM3 Entertainment Group, Inc., a film distribution/marketing company specializing in multicultural film and television projects. Materre is currently an independent media consultant, advising filmmakers and organizations on fundraising, distribution, marketing, outreach, programming and production issues. She recently acted as Outreach Consultant for Channel Thirteen/WNET on the national series, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, and is the Outreach Coordinator for the upcoming series COLORVISION. She is also the Outreach Coordinator for the POV film, West 47th Street. Materre also curated the Channel Thirteen/WNETseries Reel New York, currently programs the Harlem Film Festival series Creatively Speaking at Aaron Davis Hall, is on the faculty at New School University, and sits on the Board of Directors of New York Women in Film and Television.
Dolores Morris has been the VP of HBO Family and Documentary Programming since l998. Morris recently won an Emmy for Best Children?s Program for Through a Child?s Eyes: September 11, 2001. Morris was VP, program development at The Children?s Television Workshop (CTW) from 1994 to 1998. Before joining CTW, she served as an executive development consultant for DIC Entertainment. In 1991, Morris was VP of Walt Disney Television Animation, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Children's Special for The Mary Thomas Story. In 1990, she produced the award-winning Please God, I'm Only 17 and other programs at Churchill Entertainment. Morris became the ED of the Disney Sunday Movie in 1987, and later VP of the Magical World of Disney. Beginning in 1983, she was Director of ABC After School Specials, receiving 25 Emmies, four ACTs, ten Christophers, and a Peabody. Morris began her career creating alternative learning programs for dysfunctional students. She is a member of the NAACP, the Hunter College alumni board, the AFI and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Roberta Marie Munroe hails from Toronto, Canada where she began her film festival career at The Inside/Out Lesbian & Gay Film Festival and then moved to both Viacom Canada and The Toronto International Film Festival. Crossing the border, Roberta ran the box office for The New Festival and programmed the No Borders section of the IFP Market in New York before being lured to Hollywood to run the Outfest Los Angeles Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. A writer, filmmaker and Reiki Master, presently Roberta is the Short Film Programmer at Sundance Film Festival where she has worked to promote independent short filmmakers for 3 years.
Greg Pak is the writer and director of the independent feature film Robot Stories, which has won over 20 awards and opens theatrically February 13 in NYC, February 20 in DC, and March and April in other cities around the country. His feature screenplay Rio Chino won the IFP Market's Pipedream Screenwriting Award in 2002 and a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship in 2003. He wrote the screenplay for MVP, which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, and is working on projects for Antidote Films and Marvel Comics. Greg has directed a dozen shorts over the years, including Asian Pride Porn, Fighting Grandpa, and Po Mo Knock Knock. He runs the Web sites www.asianamericanfilm.com, www.filmhelp.com and www.robotstories.net.
Jennifer Poe wrote, directed, shot, and produced her own short film titled Caged Byrd about a mother daughter relationship and spoken word poetry. Jennifer also completed a short drumming documentary for the Lower East Side Girls Club, and has contributed several articles to the Girls Club?s newspaper Girls Out Loud. Jennifer has participated in a host of acting workshop including Shakespeare In The Boroughs at the Public Theatre. This year Jennifer plans to publish her novel and she plans to study abroad in October.
David Rees is the creator of three clip-art comics: Get Your War On, My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable. Get Your War On is a satire about the War on Terrorism. It began on the Internet and now appears regularly in Rolling Stone and Punk Planet. The sales of Get Your War On have raised over $40,000 for Mine Detection and Dog Center Team #5, a group of deminers working in Western Afghanistan.
*Also on the Jury Subcommittee for Sustainable Agriculture
Greg Rhem is Manager, Original Programming ? Documentaries for Home Box Office. He is involved with finding new and distinctive documentary programming for Cinemax Reel Life, as well as HBO?s award-winning America Undercover banner. Before joining HBO Documentaries in 1995, Mr. Rhem served as an Assistant Producer of Commercials and Industrials for Morrison Media, Inc. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Coordinator, Office Operations at New Line Cinema. Mr. Rhem holds B.A. degrees in English and Film Studies from the University of Rochester.
Jordan West, 19, is a member of Global Action Project's Urban Voices TV. A focused individual and talented digital filmmaker, Jordan has produced multiple award winning youth-produced PSAs and documentary videos and, in 2003, represented G.A.P. at both the Urban Visionaries Film Festival and the Listen Up! Youth Media Conference.
Published on April 20, 2006
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