A Girl Like Me

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

A Girl Named Kai

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

African Underground: Hip Hop in Senegal

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

All That I Can Be

William, like many young Americans, feels that joining the military is his only way out of a dead-end job and a rough life.

America for Dummies

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Aquafinito

Filmmaker
Annalise Littman

In high school, I was a member and co-president of WaterAid International, a club dedicated to educating people about the world water crisis and fundraising for water infrastructure projects in developing countries.

I attended a talk given by Deborah Lapidus of Corporate Accountability International (CAI) with my club and learned about the environmental and human rights problems associated with bottled water. I was in a teen film program at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the time. I was so blown away by Deborah’s talk that I decided to make a documentary about bottled water for my class project in the hopes that I could educate other people about what I had learned.

Deborah agreed to my filming her at a workshop she was giving, where I met Tina Clarke, Campaign Director for Massachusetts Clean Water Action. Tina agreed to be interviewed about corporation efforts to extract water for bottling purposes in Massachusetts.

I was invited by CAI to film a “Think Outside the Bottle” action at a Coke shareholders’ meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. I also interviewed someone from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, who spoke about the high quality of Massachusetts tap water.

My film addresses the prevalence of bottled water, reasons people buy it and the environmental and social costs associated with it. Many people told me that they plan to stop drinking bottled water after seeing the film. Other people have either continued to drink bottled water or only stopped temporarily.

Ashray

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Bad Choices

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Battleground Minnesota

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Book ‘Em: Undereducated, Overincarcerated

In New Haven, Connecticut the pipeline from school to prison is shorter than you might think.

Books Not Bars

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Dedicated to My Family

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Diana

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

E-Waste

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Exiled in America

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Hammoudi

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Holla Back Dubai!

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Homecoming

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

How Wal-Mart Came to Haslett

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

I Am Sean Bell

Filmmaker Stacey Muhammad

I’ve loved film for as long as I can remember. Initially, screenwriting was my interest; however, I wanted to see my ideas come to life beyond the writing. This led to a desire to acquire the skills needed to actually produce my own projects. So, I embarked upon the journey of studying and learning as much about the filmmaking process as I possibly could by attending film school, workshops, and anything else I could find.

First and foremost, I consider myself an activist, so I’m drawn to human issues and subjects that enlighten and uplift humanity while challenging us to examine our ideals and issues on this planet. I’ve always been drawn to documentary filmmaking, particularly as an activist. It’s a powerful way to communicate with an audience.
When I chose to do the Sean Bell film, I was extremely disturbed by the verdict and wanted to hear from the children, particularly young black boys, about their thoughts, fears and concerns regarding violence against black men. Most of the topics that interest me are those that give a voice to those often unheard populations of people, who indeed have stories to tell and victories to celebrate.

One thing that I’ve learned is that life is what it is—meaning, everything we do and experience is connected. Often, we try to compartmentalize our lives and deal with different aspects of our experience (be it our personal lives, our career, etc.). Filmmaking, for me, is a spiritual process and journey. I’ve been prepared through life experiences, for each and every topic I choose to explore.

So, my advice to any aspiring filmmaker would be to live your life with integrity, take care of yourself, learn as much about your craft as possible, commit to creating the life you desire and expect the universe to grant you everything you ask.

I Promise Africa

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

I’m Not a Boy

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.

Immersion

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Inch By Inch: Providence Youth Gardens for Change

Teachers and students in Providence, Rhode Island get their hands dirty and their lives enriched.

Laptop

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Laugh at the Fat Kid

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Lean on Me

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Locusts

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Luv Me Latex

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Massacre at Murambi

Official selection of the Seventh 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.

No Child

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Novela, Novela

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Perversion of Justice

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Power Up

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Rapping at Fear

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Rebel

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Shades of the Border

Filmmaker Patrick Smith

The racial issues that exist on the island of Hispaniola can hardly be described as “black and white.” Perceptions of race among Haitians and Dominicans have been evolving (or devolving) over several centuries of political, military, and social unrest, and can’t be consolidated into a brief explanation or short documentary. Thus, as a filmmaker from the United States, the intention for the film was not to create all-encompassing viewpoints, both Haitian and Dominican.

The initial idea for the documentary came from the story of an Austin woman who was unable to adopt two abandoned, Dominican-born, black children because their skin color (and lack of documentation) prevented them from getting Dominican citizenship. After some research, it was clear that this wasn’t an isolated incident, but that millions had been denied citizenship (and thus certain human rights), based on how “Haitian” they appeared to be and not based on where they were born.

Faced with the economic burden of providing for an entire population of illegal Haitians crossing the Dominican border, compacted by an already poverty-stricken population of Dominicans, the Dominican Republic strains to find a solution that isn’t “color-based.” Sadly, the peripheral effects of this issue are much more severe, often leading to violence, destruction of homes, inaccessible education, abusive working conditions, and the list goes on.

Shades of the Border explores a commonly-held notion from the Dominican media that race does not lay a role in the conflict, contrasted with an almost completely-inverse working-class opinion that the shade of someone’s skin on the island of Hispaniola speaks volumes about the individual.

Silence Speaks

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Slip of the Tongue

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Still Standing

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Storm

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Struggling to Survive

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Superstar

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

System Failure

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

The Apollos

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

The Children of Birmingham

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

The Countdown

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

The Farm Sanctuary

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

We Were Humans

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Why Do White People Have Black Spots?

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Will I Be Next?

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Young Agrarians

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food