« Wal*Mart: The High Cost of Public Relations | Main | Harold Ramis: the top of your intelligence »
November 01, 2005
Sundance Documentary Fund: the lucky 13
The Sundance Documentary Fund announced its second round of grants for 2005, with 13 feature-length documentary films selected from 460 submissions, recieving a total of $665,000, drawn from a grant from the Open Society Institute with matching moneys from the Ford Foundation, is "dedicated to supporting documentary films from around the world that focus on human rights, freedom of expression, social justice and action, civil liberties, and push the creative boundaries of form and content." Past support has gone to movies like Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski’s Born into Brothels, Catherine Tambini and Carlos Sandoval’s Farmingville, and Edet Belzberg’s 2001 Academy Award® nominee Children Underground.
Work-in-progress grants include Ngawang Choephel's Tibet in Song; Adam Zucker's Greensboro, following " survivors of the 1979 Greensboro massacre, in which members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered five Communist labor organizers, and the attempt to re-examine the killings in a present-day Truth Commission; Francois Verster's The Mother's House, " profiling three generations of women shouldering burdens of poverty, oppression and sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa; Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel's Project Kashmir, following "two American women (one Muslim and the other Hindu) to Kashmir on a mission to understand the lingering effects of war and their own cultural identities"; James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, charting "different sectors of the Iraqi public, and their experiences during the first two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein and his regime"; and Aaron Matthews's The Paper, examining "the pressures and challenges of modern journalism as faced by the staff of a University newspaper embroiled in controversy. Development grants include Robin Hessman's Russia's Pepsi Generation, "the present day lives of the last generation of Soviet Children brought up behind the Iron Curtain, and the journey of these “crossover” children in dealing with their post-Soviet reality"; and Juan Mandelbaum's Our Disappeared, the filmmaker's "personal search for friends who were “disappeared” in Argentina during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina to understand their complicated legacy." Supplemental Grants include one to Robb Moss andPeter Galison's Secrecy, considering "the fundamental threat to democracy stemming from the exponential growth of systems of classified information.The Sundance Documentary Fund supports projects in three categories—development, work-in-progress, and supplemental. Development grants provide seed funds to filmmakers whose projects are in the early research stage or in pre-production. Documentaries in production or postproduction are eligible for the Work in Progress grants. The Fund awards Supplemental grants to those projects that have previously received Development grants and that require on-going support. Funds ranging from $15,000 to $75,000 are disbursed twice a year.
Posted by pride at November 1, 2005 11:27 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)