Season 5
Fully Funded Projects
Title: Asians Misbehavin
Producer: Anula Shetty
Description: Asians Misbehavin features a blend of stand up, spoken word and sketch comedy addressing Asian American identity, racism and anti-Asian violence. Written and performed by Philadelphia based Asian American performance artists Daniel Kim, Michelle Myers, Anula Shetty and F. Omar Telan, Asians Misbehavin raises awareness of media misrepresentations of Asian Americans.
Title: At the Wall
Producer: Zilan Munas
Description: Equality at the Wall recalls the 14 year battle to integrate Girard College focusing on the core group of "freedom fighters" under the leadership of activist Cecil B. Moore who struggled against racial injustice with daily protests, pickets and frequent clashes with Frank Rizzo's police force in 1965. The fight to integrate Girard College was an important milestone of the civil rights movement for Philadelphia and the nation.
Title: Wrought Iron
Producer: Louis Massiah
Description: Wrought Iron is a documentary film about the architectural form that has helped defined middle class neighborhoods. The story of wrought iron work in Philadelphia serves as a lens to explore the relationship between older working class neighborhoods and newly gentrified communities. The existence of wrought iron in a neighborhood is something of bell-weather for the health of the community. The documentary combines personal commentary, contemporary interview, archival photos and drawings of Philadelphia's rich wrought iron traditions, and the stories of some of the great wrought iron blacksmiths of Philadelphia.
Title: Fridays at the Farm
Producer: Richard Hoffmann
Description: Fridays at the Farm is a poetic documentary following the cycle from seed planting to final crop harvesting on a small community supported organic farm in suburban Philadelphia. This project seeks to document one full growing season at a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm as seen through the eyes of one of its members. This personal diary explores our human connection to land.
Title: African Garden
Producer: Mike Kuetermeyer
Description: African Garden is a documentary about the creation of a cultural garden, Villa Africcana Colobo, to ease racial tensions in a primarily Latino neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Using a blend of interviews, oral histories, archival photographs and experimental visuals, this video documents the evolution of an abandoned, vacant lot and its transformation by a group of motivated women in the community.
Title: No Butts About It
Producer: Big Tea Party
Description: Food Fight, a new installment by Big Tea Party, sets up a Philadelphia microcosm of the Red and Blue states with a little bit of Green thrown in. Representing the two "sides" will be protestors at the International Biotechnology Industry Conference and Eagles fans tailgating before a home game. The piece will look at each "sides" eating habits. A colorful and insightful look into Philadelphian's health habits which will also show viewers how much they have in common (or not) with the "other side"
Title: Art of the Advocate
Producer: Warren Bass
Description: Art of the Advocate is a story of art in the service of the historic and continuing struggle for human rights, equality and dignity. Controversial murals in Philadelphia's Church of the Advocate interpret Biblical themes in terms of slavery, racism, social upheaval, and hope. The film interweaves artists Richard Watson and Walter Edmonds, the landmark murals they created, and the story of the politically activist church itself under Father Paul Washington during the turbulent 60s and 70s.
Title: The View from Amber Street
Producer: Artifact Pictures
Description: The View from Amber Street is a documentary about a pair of buildings in Philadelphia - about their history, their tenants past and present, and about the neighborhood they inhabit. This is a story of a neighborhood transformation in progress - a Philadelphia story as a microcosm of the larger patterns of post-industrial America.
The View from Amber Street features the many colorful tenants in the buildings, but also contextualizes them within the local community of Port Richmond, as well as within the larger national and global communities of which they are part. By gathering the many stories in the building and in the surrounding neighborhood, the film captures a building, a neighborhood, an economy, and a nation in a state of flux.
Partially Funded Projects
Title: Harmonizing
Producer: Thomas Porett
Description: Harmonizing is a documentary of the doo wop group The Emeralds that originally formed in the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War interrupted their progress and a key member Jerry Tempesta, was critically wounded and "lost singing in my heart". In the mid-1990s, Jerry and another original member, Joe Porpora, re-formed the group that includes three other members including Richie Grasso a Philadelphia songwriter with 93 credits listed with BMI. It is the story of five "brothers" that have established a solid musical reputation in this region and continue to pursue their ambition for success and vocal excellence.
Title: Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip Hop Karmel-Elana
Producer: Maori Holmes
Description: Philadelphia is often referred to as the mecca for American soul music, but right from the beginning of the hip hop movement, its artists have made major contributions as emcees, graffiti artists, dancers, and especially as deejays (e.g. Cash Money, Jazzy Jeff, King Britt). And, like many cities, the women in Philadelphia's hip hop scene often get overlooked, though there are many "making moves" behind the scenes as writers, producers, and promoters. Scene Not Heard poses the question "where are all the ladies?" and then seeks solutions for giving voice to a seemingly absent presence.
The film features interviews with some of the originators of hip-hop such as Lady B, Schoolly D and Rennie Harris, with vanguards chiming in including Bahamadia and Ursula Rucker, and presents current talents such as the Jazzyfatnastees, Ms. Jade, and Lady Alma, and emerging talents such as Versus, Keen of Subliminal Orphans and Michele Byrd-McPhee of Montäzh, as well as scholars, critics and local promoters.
Title: Philadelphia Changing
Producer: Andrew Watson
Description: Philadelphia Changing shows the filmmaker's attempts at re-photographing city scenes that were previously published in Philadelphian newspapers. The result is a poetic piece that mixes scenery of Philadelphia along with the side-by-side photographs. Comparing the original photographs with the retakes, allows the viewer to reflect on how the city has developed. Through this piece the viewer sees first hand the ever-changing face of Philadelphia.
Acquisitions Projects
Title: Implosion
Producer: Mark Scalese
Description: How do you make up for lost time when it's already too late?... Implosion is a film about grief and regret. It's also about the difficulty people have in overcoming stereotypes and preconceptions as they try to connect with one another. The implosion of Philadelphia's Veteran Stadium provides an emotional backdrop for a father's grief over his son's death in a car accident. It takes of series of encounters with his son's boyfriend for him to recognize they have more in common than he would care to admit - and to begin the slow path to healing.
The implosion of Philadelphia's Veteran Stadium provides an emotional backdrop for a father's grief over the accidental death of his gay son.
Title: A Trip
Producer: Hyun-Been Jo
Description: The main character, Yong, a pessimistic male in his early 20's, has been living in America for a couple of years. He lived with his parents before he came to America, but now he is living independently. He thinks he is living in economically difficult situations, because his family does not support him well. He is tired of living in America. He lost his dream and often wonders why he is living in a foreign country with no support, no dream, and no friends. All he does is listening to his MP3 player. He is completely lost. Then one day, his mom, Mrs. Kang came to see her son. She is a mid- aged Korean lady, and looks like a typical country style woman. Yong does not like the situation that his mom came.
Yong picks his mother up at a bus station, and they ride along a bleak country road where his old used-car finally breaks down. Yong is irritated by the situation that they got stuck in the area. Together, they walk slowly along the country road, and, unlike Yong, Mrs. Kang is just happy to be with her son. Soon, they confront some Americans, and experience an unusual journey.
Title: From the Dell to the El: A Neighborhood Evolving
Producer: New Kensington Community Developement Corporation/Scribe Video Center
Description: From the dell to the El: A Neighborhood Evolving, by New Kensington Community Development Corporation and Scribe Video Center, tells the story of Fishtown's evolution through the history of four churches in the neighborhood. Both life-long residents and newcomers share their views on the changes affecting this historically White working and middle class area.
Title: Neighbor Ladies
Producer: LeAnn Erickson
Description: In the 1950's a demographic shift began in American cities as whites fled to the suburbs, spurred on by an unscrupulous real estate practice known as blockbusting. With the diversity of their community at risk a group of neighbors in Mount Airy, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, decided to fight back.
Neighbor Ladies is a video documentary investigating a historical moment while offering a positive example of a nationally recognized diverse urban community - Mount Airy in Philadelphia. In the 1950's and into the 1960's, American cities began to feel the negative effects of white flight. Not willing to succumb to what some said was inevitable, Mount Airy neighbors organized and persevered, mounting successful legal challenges to questionable realtor activities that ultimately impacted the city and the state. While offering an urban success story, this documentary also introduces nine women who, each in their own way, helped integrate and stabilize their community.
Title: Hair Stories
Producer: Yvette Smalls
Description: "White is right; lighter is better...to children", says Erykah Badu in the new video, Hair Stories. "All the girls I knew were trying to have boyfriends with light-skin and curly hair--that was the right thing to do...When they didn't have any hair...in the back you know...they talked about it...b.b.'s or buck shots...so we all got teased; we teased one another; I teased people if their hair wasn't straight...And that's just what we were taught as children."
And so affirms the intergenerational voices of the black men and women in this 40 minute video, Hair Stories, as they recount personal narratives about acceptance and rejection as a result of hair textures. Their stories convey vivid pictures about growing up in America during the late 1940s to present, in climates ranging from post-jim crowism to black power to the current multicultural fervor.
Title: The Battle of Eshu and Iku
Producer: Aaron Blandon
Description: Seven-year-old Jalil, abandoned at an early age in Maine, finds himself adopted into a family that lives in the heart of urban Philadelphia Pennsylvania. How can everything that he has come to know change so instantly? How does he situate into this new world, these new people?
There's Betty and Robert, his new mother and father. How will they define those titles that should carry meanings of warmth and security for him? Will his new brother, 14-year-old Tommy who until now has been the only child, overcome the expected jealousies and share, what has been his world alone, with the newly arrived usurper? Can Jalil negotiate the world outside, where even a trip to the corner store can be filled with unexpected hazards? Then there are the mysteries of the basement. The basement, the darkness, the sounds, and Uncle Adisa who lives there.
Title: Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night
Producer: Sonali Gulati
Description: Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night explores the complexity of globalization in off-shoring and outsourcing of telephone support service jobs to India and questions the politics of identity from the first-person perspective of an Indian filmmaker living in the United States.
Title: Scumbling
Producer: Lynn Denton
Description: Anne, 23 an aspiring artist, returns to her parent's suburban home after a period in a psychiatric hospital. As she rejoins her family and begins the healing process, many factors tip the balance towards and away from recovery. Her returning demons, the relationship with her mother, even the family dog - all play a role as Anne attempts to connect her emotional state with her artistic dreams. Scumbling, both in the character of Anne, and in a painting, deals with many layers. As Anne struggles with her levels of consciousness, we experience her ambiguity and are led to reflect deeply on her story.
Title: Tales from the Past: LeRoy Johnson
Producer: Lulu Miller
Description: This is a documentary about the artist LeRoy Johnson, who has been making art in Philadelphia since the 1940s. Johnson started out a potter, but eventually found his true medium in trash, or, as he calls it, "urban debris." His artwork is about the urban experience in Philadelphia as reflected through the urban palette; his sculptures are wild, colorful, and political. This documentary gives a voice to his artwork, and is the collaborative efforts of two Swarthmore College students (Lulu Miller and Vicky Silvera). The narrative of the video represents LeRoy's own narrative style--at times chaotic, tangential, and always engrossingly human.
Title: Tiramisu
Producer: Leonard Guercio
Description: Like the Italian dessert, TIRAMISU is a semi-sweet cinematic contrivance with a twist ending. The film tells an uplifting story of love and commitment through the lives of an Italian-American family and their friends.
Title: Portrait of a Dude
Producer: Ned Hylton
Description: Offering a glimpse into one man's banal life after oral surgery, Portrait of a Dude follows Tyler James Kinney as he struggles with laundry, the mail, and a birthday. Completed in late April of 2004, Portrait of a Dude has gradually begun its exhibition at film festivals. To date, Portrait of a Dude has been screened at Temple University's Diamond Screen Film Festival, one of five short films that Ned exhibited there, the West Chester Film Festival, the Salute Your Shorts Showcase (preceding The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), the Algonquin Film Festival, the Phoenixville Independent Film Festival, and at the Hi Mom! Film Festival as part of a video installation series.
Title: Whole: A Trinity of Being
Producer: Shelley Barry
Description: This trilogy takes the form of experimental documentary recounting the story of a survivor of one of the lesser- known wars in South Africa, namely the "taxi wars" where there is a battle for ownership of transport routes. Nine years later, Shelley tells the story through her own visual poetry. PIN PRICKS revisits the moments when the fabric of a woman's life is torn and the revelations that take her beyond loss. VOICE/OVER is an experimental video focusing on notions of voice, language and disability. It explores silence/spoken word/speech/the ability to speak and the importance of speaking out about violence, trauma, love and survival. ENTRY explores the re-insertion of images into a media that does not reflect people with disabilities as passionate and sensual beings. Moving away from narrative structure, the film works on the level of visual metaphor, where every frame is symbolic and poetic in its composition.
Title: Little Surabaya
Producer: Anita Schillhorn Van Veen
Description: In 1998, political turmoil in Indonesia sent waves of people seeking refuge on other shores. Since then, Philadelphia, USA has been home to thousands of Indonesians.
Little Surabaya delves into this growing community. Meet Indonesians like a former calendar model, an MC from Disney World, an evangelical singer, and more, as they work - and play - to make Philadelphia their new home.
Title: Consolation
Producer: Amy Olk
Description: In Consolation, seven-year-old Sarah is a silent witness to her parent's arguments, until a tragic event leaves her mother distraught. Sarah's intuitive act of compassion contrasts sharply with her father's helplessness.
Title: Planet Greenfield: The Movie
Producer: Michael O'Riley
Description: In September, 2003, award-winning local filmmaker Michael O'Reilly, commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum & Library, began to work with a group of talented third graders on a video about their Center City neighborhood to be entitled Planet Greenfield - The Movie. This movie was a collaboration between the filmmaker, the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Greenfield Elementary School, in which all involved learned about and celebrated all that their community's history had to offer - and had a blast doing it.
Title: Rendezvous at Renaissance
Producer: David Toll
Description: endezvous At Renaissance explores Philadelphia's chapter of Renaissance Transgender Association. As told by its members, Renaissance provides education about and support of the transgender community in the Philadelphia region.
It is the rare transvestite or transsexual who has not believed, at least at one time or another, that he or she is the only person in the world who enjoys dressing in the clothes of the other gender or wants to change their gender. This sense of aloneness often brings real separation from family and friends and feelings of guilt. Many transgendered people report that only after they became better acquainted with others who share their need to crossdress or change gender did they begin to accept these conditions in themselves. The benefits of shared experiences leading to understanding and acceptance also extend to the family members and friends of the transgendered. The director's goal for this documentary was to capture the feeling of "I'm the only one" that most transgender individuals first feel to the revelation that through a support group such as Renaissance the feeling of belonging and acceptance. Individual stories are woven together to narrate this look at the transgender community.
Title: All for the Taking
Producer: George McCollough
Description: All for the Taking is a case study of how an American city struggles to redefine itself through urban renewal in the face of a growing global economy.
On April 18, 2001, the City of Philadelphia announced the arrival of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) - the most ambitious urban renewal project in its history. Through "eminent domain," a process that gives a government the right to acquire private property for public use, the City has authorized the seizure of thousands of homes, to create a massive land bank to entice private developers to rebuild some of its most historic neighborhoods. Using the vaguely defined public purpose of eminent domain developers across the country have convinced governments to seize land that they desire. The hope of generating greater tax revenues has lead to a nationwide epidemic of eminent domain abuse to occur, overlooking in process, lifelong community residents who are often elderly, poor and of color. These residents are unaware of their rights and have become confused and scared of the forces that are changing their neighborhoods and disrupting their lives.
This film documents the personal struggles of residents impacted by Philadelphia's urban renewal program and of housing activists fighting eminent domain abuse.
Title: Stepping on Upworld
Producer: Valerie Keller
Description: This experimental piece combines a vision of what you see when you look down with what you see when you look up. Built from digital photographs, it hovers between realism and surreality.
A decrepit but beautiful brick sidewalk is overlaid with a hand mirror facing up that provides a window to cloud-strewn skies, interrupted by objects that either get in the way of a clear view of the sky, or create a pleasing accent - trees, churches, an old industrial building, statues, a TV antenna. This is a visual song about the character of a Philadelphia street in Northern Liberties - old and modern simultaneously - as well as a play on being grounded but looking heavenward at the same time. Some of the images in the mirror present man-made attempts to get closer to the sky, and some are the unconscious bulk of utility, blocking access to the heavens. Trees - the only interjection of nature - serve a more decorative purpose than a cross on top of a church tower, pointing at the firmament, or an old factory building clumsily inserting itself between us and the sky.
Title: The Third Candidate
Producer: Erica Vanstone
Description: The Third Candidate follows Green Party candidate Tom Hutt and his small team, during his 4-months journey as he tries to unseat Democratic incumbent Donna Reed Miller.
Title: Portrait of Life in Progress
Producer: Chelsea O'Rourke
Description: This is not a typical World War II story. Daniela Merak was born to an upper class family in northern Poland. When the German occupation began, seven-year old Daniela and her family were ill-equipped to deal with their changing lives.
Despite these difficulties, Daniela went on to graduate college becoming one of the first women engineers of her time. An abusive marriage caused her to flee Poland for a more stable life in the United States.
Told from the perspective of her daughter, a historian, and herself. Portrait from a Life in Progress tells how Daniela overcame social boundaries as a single-mother of two children and an engineer in a male-dominated field. It is through this documentary that we bridge the gap from Daniela's uncertain beginning to the security she has found in Philadelphia.
Title: A Man in a Box
Producer: Soon Hong
Description: Man in a Box is a touching story about immigrant life, tradition and setting roots in a new land. Imagine that there is a man sitting in a box with a small window and looking outside through it. This man sells newspaper, candy, cigarettes, and chewing gum. For those years, all he has seen was only through the window. The small window on small box, called Newsstand The box is not only his limitation, also for all of Americans who came here with American dream but faced unexpected surroundings. The box is, probably, a symbol of these People.