Ragtag Film Society is excited to announce the launch of the inaugural year of PRISM during the 2020 True/False Film Fest. This new initiative spotlights 15 U.S.-based filmmakers from underrepresented communities who are evolving the language of creative nonfiction cinema. The selected artists will be joined by a critic-in-residence, three established filmmakers who will lead in-depth workshops, and invited members of both fine art and independent film industries. PRISM will bring together emerging artists with leading curators, practitioners, and thinkers for two days of artist-led convenings that are designed to disrupt the power imbalances of traditional pitch sessions and make space for more collaborative and equitable exchanges of information and resources through its non-competitive, non-funding oriented design. PRISM centers the voices of underrepresented artists and focuses on craft, conceptual frameworks, and connection. Over the course of this two-day incubator, PRISM artists will have the opportunity to discuss their artistic inspirations and ambitions, present material from their current works in progress, and share creative challenges and solutions.
2020 PRISM Artists and Projects
David Saehoon “D.S.” Chun & Mustafa Zeno | Solís, Hielo y Sol
Solís, Hielo y Sol follows Jair Solís, a jovial, hard-working father and longtime Los Angeles resident, as he resembles his life after being detained by ICE. With the support of his community and close-knit family, Jair embarks on a daunting quest to regain his dignity, with or without the talisman of an American passport.
Ilana Coleman | The Inventory
The Inventory weaves the stories of families searching for their forcibly disappeared loved ones in Mexico, with a scripted committee of linguists who, through updating the dictionary, reveal the ways in which language is used to inflict institutional violence. The committee mirrors the absurdities of the governmental bureaucracy that each family faces, as well as articulating the shortcomings of language.
Jazmin Jones | Seeking Mavis Beacon
One of the most influential Black women in technology is a figment of our collective imagination. Mavis Beacon was invented by the Co-Founder of myspace to sell the world’s most popular typing software, but the real woman she was modeled after disappeared in 1995. Seeking Mavis Beacon poses critical questions regarding anthropomorphization and the consumption of marginalized bodies in the tech industry, while reimagining the legacy of a missing historical figure.
Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil & Jackson Polys | Never Settle
Never Settle is a multi-part project that includes a feature film, public recruitment campaign and a participatory installation that invites prospective recruits to undergo an initiation. Playing with the notion of headhunting, NRO seeks to enlist candidates in their public secret society, thereby investigating shame and the desire for indigeneity.
Jessica Kingdon | UNTITLED PRC PROJECT
UNTITLED PRC PROJECT is a portrait of China’s industrial supply chain through its accelerated economy in an increasingly consumer-driven yet repressive society. With an observational lens, the feature documentary examines megatrends of today’s China, revealing paradoxes born from prosperity of the world’s emergent superpower through the cycle of production, consumption, and waste.
Zac Manuel | Anonymous
ANONYMOUS is a non-fiction film that explores Black masculinity through Black men and boys’ relationship to physical touch.
Peng Zuqiang | Inauguration
Inauguration interweaves traces of the forgetting of an assignation attempt by the Young China Association in 1910, and the forgotten journey of two Chinese Cuban that came to the US for its inauguration. Asking when images fail to represent and memories refuse to line up with documents, how can the legacy of a Chinese underground revolutionary group be told?
Naima Ramos-Chapman | Celeste
An assemblage of documentary, narrative and impressionist film using dance, archival, and text to tell an autobiographical story about a woman who falls for a sex worker she meets in a Miami bar. When the two try to see each other the next day they have sobering conversation about sex work, matrophobia, slavery in the Caribbean and envisioning a sexuality that doesn’t pantomime patriarchy.
Rajee Samarasinghe | Your Touch Makes Others Invisible
Collaboratively developed and enacted by impacted Tamil locals, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, infuses allegorical magic realism into an investigation of missing persons within a small community in Jaffna where memories of tortured interactions between the Tamils and the Sinhalese still linger in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war.
Norbert Shieh | Preserves
Preserves observes the process of making and preserving “suan cai,” as a way to capture character’s lives in transition. Blurring documentary and fiction, the film is a series of intimate vignettes detailing routines and work schedules. Through the course of one crop season (6 months), Preserves intercuts between domestic character portraits with segments following their jobs. Together, these characters and the investigation of producing food, explore the effects of agriculture on the individual and reflect the growing consciousness of how and what we consume.
Brittany Shyne | SEEDS
SEEDS is a portrait of a centennial African-American farm in Thomasville, Georgia. Using lyrical black and white imagery this meditative film examines the decline of generational black farmers and the significance of owning land.
Stephanie Wang-Breal | Florence from Ohio
Florence from Ohio is genre-twisting comedy that explores the life of Florence Wang, a Chinese woman who immigrated to Youngstown, Ohio in the 1970s from Taipei, Taiwan and the pockets of existence she created to transcend her immigrant housewife status and become a local celebrity chef and “Mrs. Mahoning County”. Florence is the filmmaker’s mother and through Florence’s St. John knitwear suits, mother and daughter collectively reimagine and embrace their generational ideas around motherhood, feminism, assimilation and race.
2020 PRISM Workshop Artists:
Elissa Blount Moorhead & Bradford Young | Back and Song
Back and Song is a meditative four-channel film and art installation that reflects on the manner in which health and wellness are part and parcel of the American black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considers the labor and care provided by generations of black healers–doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides–and their histories of contribution to, and resistance of, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine. Working with archivists from around the world, Moorhead and Young synthesized photographs of quotidian black family life into a time-based archive of expression. Paired with new footage, these archival compilations emphasized forms of movement, rest, and ecstatic experience from across the African diaspora as crucial modes of healing and attunement to the body. Across four film channels, music, movement, sound therapy, ritual dance, rest, and meditation were brought together, presented as a spectrum of individual and communal pursuits of well-being. Cumulatively, these archival compilations demonstrated the complexity and interconnectedness of different modes of healing, and how the pursuit of health is at the root of how life, breath, joy and pain manifest in the black experience.
Kevin B. Lee & Chloé Galibert-Laîné | Bottled Songs
Bottled Songs is a series of video letters exchanged between Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee, documenting their investigations of online media related to the audiovisual propaganda produced by the terrorist organization Islamic State. These “desktop epistolaries,” recorded from the artist-researchers’ computers, depict their experiences navigating through an unstable virtual environment of fear and attraction.
Lyric Cabral | The Rashomon Effect
What happened when unarmed Black teen Michael Brown was fatally shot by White police officer Darren Wilson?
2020 PRISM Arts Industry
Gina Basso (SFMoMA), Mercedes Cooper (ARRAY), Marquita Flowers (MoMA), Leah Giblin (Cinereach), Kyla McMillan (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise), Maida Lynn (Genuine Article Pictures), Monika Navarro (Firelight Media), Adam Piron (LACMA), Lendl Tellington (Blackstar Film Festival), Chi-hui Yang (Ford Foundation)
2020 PRISM Critic:
Kelli Weston (Sight and Sound)
PRISM initiative is led by the True/False programming team: Jeanelle Augustin, Chris Boeckmann, and Amir George.