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

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.

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.

Isa’s Final Draft

Global Action Project

The Youth Breaking Borders producers chose to focus on this issue because it directly impacts the majority of the group as well as many youth in the Immigrant community. By choosing to focus on the personal journey of a young undocumented woman, the youth producers highlighted both the interpersonal (an immigrant parent who doesn’t understand the institutional challenges that their child face) and institutional (the young person’s struggles with a system that blocks her from rights to an education) challenges that disempower their community. The filmmakers wanted to portray these struggles but also shed light on how the road to organizing starts with personal empowerment.

It’s Their Life: LGBT Teens in Chicago

Free Spirit Media

LGBT TEENS IN CHICAGO was created by five youth working with Free Spirit Media in partnership with the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Free Spirit Media is a non-profit organization that provides access and opportunity in media production to under-served urban youth through hands-on in school and after-school educational programs. The youth filmmakers wanted to explore the topic of homosexuality in high schools in Chicago, exposing various youth perspectives and seeking to promote understanding and respect. At the beginning of the filming process, these youth filmmakers were not aware of the daily harassment LGBT youth in Chicago face. Throughout the process of creating this documentary, the youth filmmakers experienced a transformation; they were not only revealing these injustices to their audience but they were becoming fully aware for themselves of the harsh reality many LGBT youth experience.

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

Talking About It

Filmmaker Isaac Haney-Owens

I joined BAYCAT, a San Francisco nonprofit community media production company, in the fall of 2009. At that time, I was just finishing high school and wanted to learn how to make films. I became a young media producer at BAYCAT taking filmmaking classes and started to work on films. At the beginning I was reluctant to be in front of the camera, but with time and some training on production and acting for the camera, I was able to feel more at ease and became more confident. I was excited that BAYCAT then offered me an internship. While working on our 19th episode of BAYCAT’s youth produced
TV show “Zoom In”, we focused on interpretations of “Legacy”. We were asked to reflect on what others have left for us, and what we would like to leave behind for future generations. With some encouragement from Marco, the Program Director and the BAYCAT team, I took a chance and started working on TALKING ABOUT IT. The film provides people with a snapshot into my life, living with Asperger’s, and my art. Besides turning the camera on myself, I asked my mom Karen a few questions, and I also included some of my photographs at the end.

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