Category: Filmmaker Support
Congratulations to Re-Take Oakland filmmaker A.K. Sandhu! ALIVE IN BRONZE: Huey P. Newton is nominated for Outstanding Short Form Documentary for the 2024 NAACP Image Awards!
In ALIVE IN BRONZE: Huey P. Newton, sculptor Dana King’s hands and activist Fredrika Newton’s memories come together to build a new monument that honors the Black Panther Party’s vital place in American history.
Congratulations to Re-Take Oakland filmmakers, Jessica Jones and A.K. Sandhu, for being selected as 2024 SFFILM FilmHouse Residents. The FilmHouse Residency is managed by SFFILM Makers, the artist development program at SFFILM, and provides 12-month residencies to local filmmakers actively engaged in various stages of production.
Jessica Jones‘s documentary short, Women Who Ride, profiles Tish Edwards, the founder of Oakland’s first black women’s motorcycle club D’Vious Wayz.
A.K. Sandhu‘s feature documentary, UNTITLED MOTHERHOOD Project, follows women who dare to choose while defying the patriarchy in a time when their reproductive rights are no longer guaranteed.
Congratulations to For Us, By Us fellow, Priyanka Suryaneni, for being awarded the East Bay Fund for Artists grant from the East Bay Community Foundation for her film, Saranam Gacchâmi (I take refuge).
Saranam Gacchâmi is a documentary film about an enterprising Buddhist Monk who defies all odds to set up one of the largest Tibetan Monasteries in the Bay Area to preserve the endangered Tibetan culture and traditions.
For Us, By Us fellow, Chad Santo Tomas, was featured in BAVC Media‘s SF Commons Presents: Personal Docs event on December 14, 2023 at Ninth Street Independent Film Center in San Francisco.
The event highlighted personal documentary filmmaking from local Bay Area filmmakers through a series of snippets from films and moderated discussion with the filmmakers about the challenges and triumphs in their creative process from development to distribution. Other featured filmmakers were Elizabeth Herrera, Mabel Valdevizio, and Vanessa Smith.
Congratulations to Re-Take Oakland filmmaker, Jay Gash, for being awarded a Black Women Photographers x Nikon Grant. This grant fund awards monetary grants and Nikon Z gear to Black creatives working in the industry. The grants are marked to aid the completion of visual projects and help with business expenses.
ALIVE IN BRONZE: Huey P. Newton, directed by Re-Take Oakland filmmaker A.K. Sandhu, was acquired by MTV Films and is now streaming on Paramount+.
In ALIVE IN BRONZE: Huey P. Newton, sculptor Dana King’s hands and activist Fredrika Newton’s memories come together to build a new monument that honors the Black Panther Party’s vital place in American history.
Toni Bell, Re-Present Media’s Impact Consultant, and Jennifer Crystal Chien, Re-Present Media’s Director, presented a workshop, Restorative Practices for BIPOC Arts Administrators, at the Arts Administrators Color Network Annual Convening on November 12, 2023 in Chicago.
This workshop focused on principles and practices for BIPOC arts administrators working within environments rooted in white supremacist culture. The vision was to focus on working sustainably and effectively amid predictable challenges that arise.
We discussed common institutional and interpersonal dynamics within white dominant culture organizations and introduced restorative practices and strategies within the areas of sustainability, recentering BIPOCs, and community building.
Concepts we covered included:
The goal of this workshop was to support decolonization of participants towards healthier ways of relating to organizations, others, oneself, and the work, which relates to the conference theme of “We Will Flourish.” This session was intended for those who are BIPOC working with or inside white dominant culture organizations and environments and come from a collective empowerment cultural lens.
Congratulations to Re-Take Oakland filmmaker, Pallavi Somusetty, for being awarded the IDA Logan Elevate Grant, for her film, Coach Emily. With this grant, she will receive $30,000, story consulting, dedicated artist support, year-long individualized professional development opportunities and filmmaker-guided public programming.
Coach Emily is a feature documentary that follows Emily Taylor, an Oakland-based Black and queer rock climbing coach, as she battles systemic racism in her professional and personal life. Through her Brown Girls Climbing program, Emily trains young girls of color, including her own daughter, as they resist discrimination in the climbing world and work to define themselves in the outdoors.
We are excited to announce that Re-Present Media received a California Humanities grant for our event series, For Us, By Us: Our Beloved Communities. The series is planned to take place in Spring 2024.
In partnership with Filmmakers Collaborative SF, we are presenting a film screening and discussion event series highlighting six documentary films made by a multicultural group of local filmmakers who are telling personal stories of Bay Area community heroes. The featured filmmakers were fellows in our inaugural For Us, By Us Filmmaker Incubator program in 2023. We look forward to continuing to amplify their work and are grateful to California Humanities for their support!
We participated in the Color Congress National Convening, a biannual event for member organizations of Color Congress.
At the inaugural National Convening, 78 leaders of documentary organizations based in the United States and US islands gathered in Atlanta and online for three days with the aim of building trust, a shared vision for a reimagined documentary landscape, and a plan for our collective work forward.