Tribeca Film Institute Announces Tribeca All Access Grants To Ten Projects

TRIBECA FILM INSTITUTE® ANNOUNCES TRIBECA ALL ACCESS® GRANTS TO TEN PROJECTS

TAA Celebrates 13 Years of Support for Underrepresented

Scripted and Documentary Filmmakers

[New York, NY – March 31, 2016] – Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) today announced the selection of ten distinctive projects for the 13th annual Tribeca All Access (TAA) program, which provides filmmakers from communities largely underrepresented in the industry with year-round support, guidance, and resources to complete their projects. The TAA grantees are also welcomed into the TAA Alumni program which supports their present and future work. In 2016, TAA will award a total of $100,000 in grant money.

Ten exceptional scripted and documentary works-in-progress were selected by TFI’s Artist Programs team, overseen by Amy Hobby, Vice President of Artist Programs at TFI. They encompass both emerging and established filmmakers.

“Tribeca All Access champions distinctive auteurs from a plurality of backgrounds, styles and points of view and stands by them throughout their careers,” says Hobby. “This year, we are privileged to be supporting films that tackle subjects as diverse as NFL cheerleaders uniting to fight for equal employment rights, Muslim morticians who are using funeral homes as a place to fight gang violence, and a young couple accused of stealing the secret to the atomic bomb.”

Founded in 2004, TAA has served as TFI’s longest-running scripted and documentary filmmaker program, specializing in providing a range of programming for storytellers who create groundbreaking projects that bring unheard voices to the mainstream.

TAA is made possible by Time Warner Foundation, a leading supporter of TFI since 2006, with additional support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and New York State Council on the Arts.

“The Time Warner Foundation’s mission is to seek innovative and powerful ways to discover, nurture and celebrate the next generation of storytellers,” said Lisa Garcia Quiroz, President, Time Warner Foundation. “In partnership with Tribeca Film Institute, the Foundation strives to push the boundaries of artist development and support these talented storytellers. We are thrilled to support this year’s TAA filmmakers in creating rich, vibrant and relevant works for today’s audiences.”

Since 2004, TAA has supported 268 films and more than 500 filmmakers who are from communities largely underrepresented in the entertainment industry. TAA projects have gone on to receive worldwide exposure and acclaim, and include: Five Nights in Maine, Nas: Time is Illmatic, Obvious Child, (T)ERROR, Thank You For Playing,Evolution Of A Criminal, Una Noche, and Gideon’s Army.

At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival®, TAA-supported filmmakers will participate, along with grantees from TFI’s other programs, in TFI Network, a market of one-on-one industry meetings which allows the filmmakers to network with film industry executives, potential investors, development executives, producers, and agents. Additionally, they will get to attend a Pitch Preparation Workshop and Open House, which will include short talks by industry experts on best practices.

Five grants will be awarded to scripted projects in various stages:

• Daughters of Abdul-Rahman:Written and Directed by Zaid Abu Hamdan. Produced by Rula Nasser. Four estranged Jordanian sisters must join forces to find their suddenly missing father. A heartwarming comedic story that observes the patriarchal society in the Middle East, practiced by men and women alike.
• The Rosenbergs:Directed by Sophie Barthes; Written by Yon Motskin; Produced by Anil Baral and Neda Armian; Produced by and Starring Elisabeth Moss. Part gripping crime drama, part heartbreaking love story, and part tense political thriller, this is the powerful true story of the Rosenbergs told through the eyes of Ethel, a young singer and housewife who, along with her husband, is arrested, tried and executed for espionage.
• Love Comes Later:Written and Directed by Sonejuhi Sinha; Produced by Charlotte Rabate. Upon her illegal arrival in America, a young South Asian woman is forced to work at a motel, where the lives of immigrant women, drug dealers and loan sharks collide, prompting her to embark on an ill-fated run for her life.
• Solace:Directed, Written and Produced by Tchaiko Omawale; Produced by and starring Hope Olaide Wilson. Following the death of her father, a 17-year-old girl is sent to live with her estranged family and finds comfort in a questionable friendship with a self-destructive neighbor, leading both on a startling path to self-discovery.
• First Match: Directed and Written by Olivia Newman; Produced by Chanelle Elaine, Veronica Nickel, and Bryan Unkeless. Hardened by years in foster care, a teenage girl from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood decides that wrestling boys is the only way back to her estranged father.

Five grants will be awarded to documentary projects in various stages:

• A Woman’s Work: Directed and Produced by Yu Gu; Produced by Elizabeth Ai. Football and feminism collide in this feature documentary that follows three former NFL cheerleaders as they battle against their former teams and the NFL to reverse 50 years of illegal employment practices. Their legal and personal journeys shed light on gender inequality today, while instigating league-wide reform.
• Whose Streets?: Directed and Produced by Damon Davis; Directed by Sabaah Jordan; Produced by Sabaah Jordan and Flannery Miller. A firsthand look at how the murder of one teenager became the last straw for a community under siege. Whose Streets? is a story of love, loss, conflict, and ambition; the journey of everyday people turned freedom fighters, whose lives intertwined with a burgeoning national movement for black liberation.
• Idiom (Hale County This Morning, This Evening): Directed and Produced by RaMell Ross. Idiom presents the lives of two young men living in the historic American South. Real and fictional time pass in an ode to Hale County, Alabama.
• Two Gods: Directed and Produced by Aman and Zeshawn Ali. Fed up with making caskets and arranging funerals for young men who are continuously dying at the hands of gang violence, a group of Muslim morticians in Newark, NJ are uniting to bring the boys into their funeral homes to teach them the weight of death and help a community heal and grow again.
• Losing Sight of Shore: Directed by and Produced by Sarah Moshman; Executive Produced by Audra Smith and Courtney Smith. Losing Sight of Shore is the extraordinary journey of four brave women that set out to row the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Australia.

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About Tribeca Film Institute (http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org)

Tribeca Film Institute champions storytellers to be catalysts for change in their communities and around the world. Each year, we identify a diverse group of exceptional filmmakers and media artists and empower them with funding and resources to fully realize their stories and connect with audiences. Further, our education programs empower students through hands-on training and exposure to socially relevant films, offering young people the media skills necessary to be creative and productive global citizens. We are a year-round nonprofit organization founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in the wake of September 11, 2001.

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