News and Announcements

LEF Foundation awards $20,000 to New England

Independent Documentary Filmmakers for Projects in Pre-Production

Boston, MA (October 2009) - In its first grant deadline focused entirely on projects in Pre-Production, the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund awarded 4 grants of $5,000 each to independent documentary filmmakers creating innovative films with a unique artistic voice (see full list below). “Finding development support for projects in this early stage of production is rare,” shared Lyda Kuth, LEF Executive Director. “We are proud that LEF makes funding at this stage a priority to help New England documentary filmmakers get their projects off the ground.”

LEF received approximately 100 inquiries for this grant round, with 29 proposals submitted. The 4 grants awarded represent 14% of this group of highly competitive projects. “We were very excited about the quality of the projects that came forward for this deadline,” said LEF Program Manager, Sara Archambault.

The LEF Moving Image Fund invests in projects that demonstrate excellence in technique, strong storytelling ability, and originality of artistic vision and voice. In addition to this criteria, selected projects represent a range of filmmakers at different stages in their artistic careers, from emerging to established makers. “Identifying and nurturing the documentary talent of New England is important to LEF,” says Archambault.

The films awarded pre-production support include projects looking at the challenges of communicating the dangers of a nuclear waste burial site to future generations; the intersections of faith and medicine; the role of design in community building in a small town in Alabama; and the impact of the global economy on the townspeople of Kerala, India.

“These films represent a collection of stories relevant to our contemporary moment,” Archambault reflected. “They tackle big issues through the lens of particular sites or events in an effort to understand our world with greater depth and clarity.”

Fall 2009 Pre-Production Grants

Brooke Brewer, $5,000
Designing Change

Downtown Greensboro, Alabama is home to two restaurants, one for whites and one for blacks. Flava, the black restaurant is on the east end of town, while Mustang Oil, the white restaurant is one the west end. Between them sits The Pie Lab. Opened in 2009, The Pie Lab is the brainchild of a group of young designers looking to make a difference in a small town suffering from incredible wealth disparities and a history of racism. The designers hoped to bring life to a decaying downtown and create a place that would become a neutral hub for both whites and blacks, inspiring conversation in a familiar setting over pie and coffee. Through observing the opening and operation of The Pie Lab, Designing Change will tell the larger story of a group of outsiders with good intentions imposing their own ideas and a town coping with an influx of do-gooders, the change they create, and the issues of identity, racism and segregation that those changes inevitably uncover. It is a story about collaboration, communication and the recognition that a good idea from outsiders with the best of intentions will be molded by the community - not the other way around.

Peter Galison and Robb Moss, $5,000
Wastelands

After half a century of nuclear weapons production, an indestructible legacy of defense-related, mid- to high-level (‘transnuranic’) nuclear waste remains – and will be with us for tens of thousands of years. We are now, with the help of miners and robots, burying that residue a half a mile underground in ancient sea beds of salt at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico. This feature-length documentary film will address both that burial and the desperate, fantastical, and necessary attempt to warn the future four hundred generations from now that they must not, under any circumstances, enter this toxic place. Without knowing if they will speak any language related to ours, without knowing what their societies will be, scientists, from astronomers to archeologists, are designing markers and symbols to warn the far future of what we have done.

Jake Mahaffy, $5,000
Acts

Five years ago in a poor storefront church an eight-year old autistic boy suddenly died during a prayer service. The boy’s own mother was holding his feet to the floor as he lay under the ministrations of the congregation. One man from that group was sent to prison for crushing the child to death. How could someone crush a child for two hours the entire time believing that he was helping him? Acts is a feature length documentary film about a man who tried to perform a miracle and failed.

Kavita Pillay, $5,000
My Good Name is Stalin

Unbeknownst to most people, Stalin and Lenin are not only alive but are currently residing in the south Indian state of Kerala. Home to the world’s first democratically elected communist government, Kerala’s numerous Stalins and Lenins are a quirky and continuing testimony to the state’s half-century romance with Red Rule. Deemed by National Geographic to be “One of the World’s 10 Paradises,” Kerala is also increasingly dependent on money sent home by those who have emigrated to wealthier places, most notably the Persian Gulf, where millions of workers from around the world toil in conditions that range between servitude and slavery. By examining the lives of a handful of Keralites named Lenin and Stalin, this tragicomic documentary will offer a sensitive and satirical look at shifting notions about communism, capitalism, migrants, migration, individual needs and their global consequences, as experienced by residents of this unique and verdant corner of the world’s largest democracy.