BAVC Media Pronounces Newest Group Of MediaMaker Fellows

EXCLUSIVE: BAVC Media has named the newest group of nonfiction filmmakers to participate in its prestigious documentary movie fellowship program. The octet introduced at the moment will obtain $10,000 every in “unrestricted funding, mentorship, trade entry, suggestions classes, and workshops throughout an immersive 9-month expertise.”

The BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship was established in 1991 to assist rising filmmakers and various initiatives. This 12 months’s cohort consists of Ademola (Ellas Vinieron de Las Nubes / They Got here From the Clouds); Chelsi Bullard (Unfiltered); Caron Creighton (Wooden Road); Julia Hunter (That is Me Loving You); Patrick G. Lee (Untitled KQT Venture); Ivan MacDonald (When They Have been Right here); Khai Thu Nguyen (The Full Thao), and Pallavi Somusetty (Coach Emily). [Scroll for more about the filmmakers and their projects].

The fellowship offers “two intensive convenings in San Francisco, a slate of digital workshops all year long, and all-access journey to the Worldwide Documentary Affiliation’s biennial Getting Actual convention in Los Angeles and the Camden Worldwide Movie Pageant in midcoast Maine.”

“We’re so excited in regards to the cohort now we have constructed for 2024 after an intense evaluate course of,” mentioned Brittney Réaume, affiliate director of artist improvement at BAVC Media. “These filmmakers have already achieved a lot, usually with little or no assist. We’re honored to have the ability to information them by means of the vital subsequent steps of their journey. Our objective is for every filmmaker to stroll away from this expertise not solely with a imaginative and prescient and a plan to finish their movie, however relationships that may assist them by means of their careers.”

This system, supported with grants from the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Basis, and Kenneth Rainin Basis (with extra MediaMaker packages supported by the Perspective Fund and Movie SF) invests in unbiased, rising and mid-career artists engaged on social-issue documentary initiatives.

Two BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship alums lately debuted movies at SXSW: Robie Flores (The In Between) and Contessa Gayles (Songs From the Gap). Amongst different program alums are Jacqueline Olive (All the time In Season), Silvia Del Carmen Casaños (Hummingbirds), Lagueria Davis (Black Barbie), Kevin D. Wong (Dwelling Is a Lodge), Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There), Eugene Yi (Free Chol Soo Lee), Rodrigo Reyes (Sansón and Me), Chelsea Hernandez (Constructing the American Dream), and Emelie Mahdavian (Midnight Traveler).

BAVC Media (based in 1976 as Bay Space Video Coalition) describes itself as a “neighborhood hub and useful resource for media makers within the Bay Space and throughout the nation, serving a number of thousand freelancers, filmmakers, job-seekers, activists, and artists yearly.”

The choice committee for this 12 months’s fellows was comprised of Paige Bethmann, 2023 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow; Jess Kwan, Vice President, The Concordia Fellowship, Non-Fiction; Justine Nagan, Head of Manufacturing, Precise Movies; Andre Perez, Filmmaker & Social Affect Marketing consultant; Brittney Réaume, Affiliate Director of Artist Growth, BAVC Media; Paula Smith Arrigoni, Govt Director, BAVC Media; Daybreak Valadez, BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship Co-Director; Debra Wilson, Filmmaker & BAVC Media Board Member, and Jin Yoo-Kim, BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship Co-Director.

Beneath is extra details about the brand new cohort of BAVC MediaMaker fellows and their initiatives:

Jamal Ademola is a Nigerian-American artist and filmmaker who creates throughout movie, video, animation, portray, set up, performing, and efficiency. Working on the intersection of cinema and tremendous artwork, Ademola’s work explores inter-cultural expressions of blackness, identification, reminiscence, goals, and migration to domesticate a way of place and belonging. As an actor, he appeared in “Think about a Moon Colony” on the Hulu TV collection Your Consideration Please and Ten Cent Daisy, streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Tubi. Jamal is the inventive director of The Blind Couple From Mali, an upcoming characteristic documentary movie about Grammy-nominated musicians Amadou and Mariam, produced by Makers and French conglomerate Mediawan.

Ellas Vinieron de Las Nubes / They Got here From the Clouds – Mixing documentary and fiction, Ellas Vinieron de Las Nubes is a hybrid movie that follows three younger Afro-Mexicans, José David, Fanni, and Marlen, as they search to rediscover their ancestral African roots amongst the mythic landscapes of Oaxaca. Via a mix of cinema verite, interviews, fictionalized narratives, and delightful hand-drawn animation, the movie creates portals to private histories, reminiscences, goals, and visions, increasing the cinematic nonfiction kind. In Mexico, Blackness is shamed, with lighter pores and skin being most popular. José David, a quiet cumbia singer, is haunted by the painful legacy of his brother’s mysterious departure, whereas Fanni, a demure school pupil, is ensnared by the lingering shadow of her mom’s absence, when she embarked for america on the tender age of two. Marlen, a radiant Afro-Mexican mannequin, seeks solutions about her personal identification and familial historical past. As they delve deeper into the depths of their African roots, they confront harsh realities and the echoes of migration, which linger like ghosts of their neighborhood. The movie is notable for being supported by the Black Expertise on Xfinity Grant Program by Comcast (NBCUniversal), which incorporates potential distribution on streaming platforms as soon as the movie is full.

Chelsi Bullard is a Memphis-born and Brooklyn-based filmmaker and editor with an unwavering want to revive magnificence, well-being and complexity in tales about Black folx. She is a 2022-2023 Brown Ladies Doc Mafia Black Director’s Fellow, a 2023 Large Sky Pitch participant and a 2023 Cucalorus + Working Movies WiP Lab recipient. She edited the characteristic documentary The Proper to Learn (Santa Barbara, 2023 and SXSW EDU, 2023) with director Jenny Mackenzie and govt producer LeVar Burton.

Unfiltered – The eldest of 5 daughters, 15-year-old Tamia is anticipated to carry out home chores and act as a further caretaker. A protector and budding poet, she speaks her reality by means of rhythmic verse. Tamia makes highly effective strides to speak to her mother that she wants a break, at the same time as the truth of their scenario escalates. Tamia takes her 7-year-old sister, London, underneath her wings to defend her from the pressures for Black women to develop up too quick. The pair rework Brooklyn into their playground earlier than Tamia’s departure to school separates them for the primary time. Can Tamia go away with out the cycle resetting for her little sister?

Unfiltered is a young and well timed story of affection, sisterhood, intergenerational therapeutic, and second possibilities.

Caron Creighton is a Black, biracial lady and an award profitable journalist and filmmaker. She has reported on Israel/Palestine, international African migration patterns, and the Bay Space’s homelessness disaster. She has beforehand labored for The Related Press, AJ+ and The San Francisco Chronicle and was a Pulitzer Heart grantee. A lot of her work is targeted on displacement inside the African diaspora, together with reporting on the struggles confronted by Eritrean migrants in Israel, and West African migration by means of Latin America.

Wooden Road – As soon as Oakland’s largest homeless encampment, Wooden Road is the final cease for unhoused “brothers,” John and LaMonté. They moved there eight years in the past after police pushed them from different encampments across the metropolis. After a devastating fireplace, their tight-knit neighborhood faces eviction. It’s their objective to cease it.

Julia Hunter is a Chicago-based documentary director, producer and DP whose work resists objectivity and facilities survivorship, hurt discount, and systemic abuse.

That is Me Loving You – Sydney, a gregarious heroin consumer, strikes right into a Chicago restoration residence and befriends Julia, an alcoholic filmmaker. When Sydney will get pregnant and returns to her abusive boyfriend, each ladies reenter the world of abuse and habit, a world that so usually calls for we select between defending one another or saving ourselves.

An intimate portrait of friendship made within the trenches of overlapping crises, That is Me Loving You is a manifesto of radical care exhibiting what it means to heal ourselves within the midst of programs that promise assist however as an alternative maintain us down.

Patrick G. Lee (they/them) is a queer diasporic Korean filmmaker, author, and neighborhood organizer. Patrick is curious about constructing collaborative fashions of filmmaking that equip LGBTQ individuals of coloration with media-making abilities. Their most up-to-date mission, Unstated, received a number of pageant awards and is educationally distributed by Third World Newsreel. Their NBC docuseries, Looking for Queer Asian Pacific America, received the NAMIC Imaginative and prescient Award for Lengthy Kind Digital Media.

Untitled KQT Venture is a characteristic documentary that follows a selected household of queer and trans nightlife performers in Seoul, Korea, as they navigate gender, search belonging, and shield their freedoms, all whereas joyfully rejecting societal pressures to evolve.

All through the movie, glimpses of the filmmaking course of are interwoven with footage of the protagonists’ day-to-day lives, establishing the movie as a dialog between queers within the homeland and people within the diaspora. In bringing these components collectively, the movie traces a queer, transnational imaginative and prescient for an plentiful future that’s related to all of us as we navigate ongoing international crises – a imaginative and prescient rooted in interdependence, shared vulnerability, and tender acceptance.

Ivan MacDonald is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe. His most up-to-date mission Convey Them Dwelling received the Large Sky Award on the 2024 Large Sky Documentary Movie Pageant. Convey Them Dwelling is Govt Produced and narrated by Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone. He was an inaugural fellow for the Netflix and Illuminative Producers fellowship and was an inaugural recipient of the Hulu and Firelight Kindling fund.

When They Have been Right here is a documentary in regards to the Lacking and Murdered Indigenous Ladies and Ladies disaster on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, informed by means of the eyes of the households and neighborhood members left behind. The movie traces experiences by means of time, place, and reminiscence‚ and examines the legacy of violence within the place they name residence.

Khai Thu Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker whose works usually search to spotlight the inventive practices of individuals whose tales are usually not often informed. Her movies give attention to exploring how the method of creating artwork intersects with how we articulate ourselves. She is fascinated by the battle out and in of inventive mediums as a automobile in individuals’s efforts to jot down themselves and produce sense and company to their experiences.

The Full Thao follows comic Thao P. Nguyen over two years getting ready a brand new comedy present whereas weaving in her each day life that varieties materials for her efficiency routine. She artfully cares for her 3 year-old son whereas making a present about motherhood in “chunks.” Demonstrating that there’s no “a technique of doing queer,” Thao’s balancing act is to stay true to herself in her roles as a Vietnamese American daughter, a mom, and a member of the queer neighborhood.

Pallavi Somusetty is a director and cinematographer whose documentary portraits heart BIPOC voices within the hope that we really feel absolutely seen, exploring intersections of identification and belonging for our communities. She has been a collection producer for A-Doc’s Storytelling Initiatives since 2020 (together with Emmy-nominated collection Asian American Tales of Resilience and Past), and is presently a supervising producer for A-Doc’s 2024 election-focused microdocs collection Our Tales, Our Voices.

Coach Emily – Emily Taylor, an Oakland-based queer Black mountain climbing coach, fearlessly trains a various group of BIPOC women and non-binary youngsters, together with her home-schooled daughter, to beat not solely the towering cliffs but additionally the pervasive discrimination they face within the nice open air. As Emily empowers her college students to assert their place in nature, she embarks on a profound journey of self-care, navigating the challenges that include working to dismantle an trade rife with institutionalized discriminatory practices.