Past
Grantees

STEVEN MATHESON, St. Paul, MN, received support of $10,000 for News/Year, a 52 episode (30-90 seconds each) online/CD-ROM weekly series of experimental moving-image works investigating the relationship between daily life and the daily news.

WYATT MCDILL, Minneapolis, MN, received support of $10,000 for Garbage, a short narrative about life in a disposable society. The life portrayed is a character's named Mouse, a solitary garbage man. Disposable society is manifested everywhere around him, most literally in the garbage he collects and creates, but also in the ubiquitous advertisements he sees, in the consumable TV programs he watches and in the forgettable break-room chatter of his co-workers.

GREG PAK received a grant for Brother Killer Wolf, a feature-length documentary that tells the stories of several very different Americans whose lives are intertwined with wolves, including: members of the Nez Perce tribe, who manage the Idaho wolf reintroduction program; a wolf trapper in Alaska; a cattle rancher dealing with wolf depredation; a biologist studying a wolf pack; an activist involved in the save-the-wolf campaign; and a suburban owner of a wolf-dog hybrid.

WALID RAAD received support for Hostage, an experimental documentary about the Western Hostage Crisis. The crisis refers to the abduction and detention in Lebanon in the 1980's and early 1990's of western men such as Terry Anderson, Thomas Sutherland, Terry Waite and Brian Keenan by so-called Islamic Militants. This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, US, French, and British political and public life. The crisis also precipitated a number of high profile political scandal like the Iran-Contra affair in the US, and L'Affaire Gordgi in France.

POLA RAPAPORT received support for Family Secret, a nonfiction film about Rapaport's discovery in the last few months of a half-brother she never knew existed, who is now in his fifties and lives in Romania.

CRAIG RENAUD received support for This World, a feature-length documentary that tells the two-year story of an inner-city youth, from the projects of Harlem, who struggles to lift up his family from the hardships of ghetto life.

DEMPSEY RICE received a grant for Daughter of Suicide, a personal documentary about the suicide of the filmmaker's mother and the path her family has taken to heal.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ received support for Venus in Furs, a feature-length narrative film about the masochistic relationship between a young poet and dilettante named Severin, and Wanda, the free-spirited widow with whom he falls in love.

ANGEL VELASCO SHAW received a grant for Excuse meAre You Pilipino?, a feature-length documentary, set in New York, San Francisco and Hawaii that examines the unique ways some Filipino Americans create culture and community.

TARA SPARTZ, Minneapolis, MN, received a grant of $10,000 for I Hate Baby-sitting, a 45-minute narrative that tells the story of the big plan of two teenage girls to escape the frustrations of babysitting for one night, before beginning new lives in senior high school.

SASHA WATERS was awarded support for Life in These Small Hollows, a half-hour documentary about coal field residents in southern West Virginia and their efforts to save their homes from the ruinous effect of mountaintop strip mining.

JUAN CARLOS MARTINEZ-ZALDIVAR received support for 90 MILES, an intensely personal, short video documentary about the emotional wounds Cubans and Cuban-Americans live with everyday because of the deep divide separating the United States and Cuba.

DOUG AITKEN received funding for Eraser, a process-based experimental film that follows a perfectly linear path, from North to South, for exactly six miles, exploring the effects of the Soufrieres volcano on the small Caribbean Island of Monserrat. In the process of making this journey, however, viewers will encounter a transformation that takes them from a tranquil garden island, to a landscape that reaches a point of complete abstraction, and ultimately reductive silver-gray landscape absent of any light, form or human activity-a void of absolute emptiness and neutrality.

Omonike Akinyemi - Nelly's Bodega, a 25-minute, color, 16mm drama that details the development of a friendship between Fatima, a twelve-year-old African-American girl, and Nelly, a physically abused Latina woman. It is through Fatima that Nelly realizes she must look to the literal and spiritual child within her for happiness and leave a marriage riddled with battery. When Nelly comes to this realization the entire neighborhood in which she lives begins to heal as well.

Zoe Beloff - Where Were There Where, an interactive film on CD ROM which is centered around the play "Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights" by Gertrude Stein, in the sense of finding a contemporary formal equivalent in digital media for the radical restructuring of the 1938 text. Also, as a playful philosophical investigation of the relationship between electricity, logic and language games that Stein's work inspires. Thus opening the text up to parallel radical perspectives in the work of I.P. Pavlov, Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

CECILIA DOUGHERTY received a grant in support of Gone, a 60-minute experimental narrative remake of episode two of An American Family, the acclaimed 1974 PBS documentary series on the Loud Family.

THALIA DRORI, Minneapolis, MN, $10,000. Drori received support for Waiting for Daryl, a 28-minute absurd, dark and comic 16mm experimental narrative based on her experiences growing up Jewish and female in America in the 1960s.

Robert Fenz - Revival, a poetic 16mm documentary/experimental film about jazz music as an art form which was created as a metaphorical and literal means out of slavery; a form of expression in which form directly addresses the basic dialectic of freedom and slavery, or structure and improvisation. Mr. Fenz will bring these considerations into his film project, while understanding and contextualizing other historical elements in the development of this unique musical art form as well.

HOLLY FISHER was awarded support for BURMA LAND/SCAPES, an experimental video which will involve the viewer in exploring the seemingly innocent activity of tourism in Burma. At its simplest level the viewer will witness the filmmaker's personal travelogue of locations, people, rhythms, and the interaction of a traveler discovering a new land. But as testimonies from refugees and archival materials from colonial, underground, and other sources are woven into the fabric of this diary, space is created for a multiplicity of narratives. This video panorama will exploit myriad levels of meaning while unleashing a fuller accounting of forced labor and relocation, bondage, terror and denial of basic human rights that underpin Burma's tourism campaign.

AMY JENKINS received a grant for Sheltering for Daydreaming, From the Same Water and Whirligig, a video installation, composed of three segments, that will investigate the home as a locus for memory, expectation and metamorphosis.