BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) has announced the recipients of their 2022 BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship, a program dedicated to supporting documentary filmmakers recognized for using powerful cinematic techniques and languages to spotlight the critical issues of our time. Among this year’s recipients are five Latinx and Caribbean creators selected for working in realms beyond the traditional bounds of documentary form to ask urgent questions in captivating new ways: Luis Gutiérrez Arias, Gabriela Díaz Arp, Silvia Castaño, Yeelen Cohen, and Jason Fitzroy Jeffers.
Aside from receiving $10,000 in unrestricted funding to support their filmmaking initiatives, recipients will also receive professional mentorships, access to industry contacts, and structure for workshopping projects in an inclusive and collaborative environment.
Luis Gutiérrez Arias is a Latinx filmmaker dedicated to exploring notions of nationalism, decoloniality and territory through human relationship to landscape. His work has been shown at Sundance, DokLeipzig, Full Frame, Melbourne IFF, Images, Message to Man, Dokufest Kosovo and Ambulante, among others. His short documentary It’s Going to be Beautiful (2018) received an award for Best Cinematography at the Tacoma Film Festival and was selected to be part of the curated The Atlantic Select series. Gutierrez Arias was also a fellow during the 2019 Doc’s Kingdom seminar and was part of the Berlinale Talents Guadalajara 2015. On top of his own practice, he is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in process, practice and curation. He has received the BAVC Fellowship to support his upcoming film project Todo lo sólido (All That Is Solid), which tells the story of an island sinking into the Caribbean Sea.
Atlanta-based Puerto Rican filmmaker Gabriela Díaz Arp is a film and commercial director and producer interested in re-imagining the documentary space through hybrid, immersive and participatory filmmaking. Additionally, Arp uses her platform as a Puerto Rican director and producer to demonstrate the ways in which visual language can fortify human connection and understanding. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, CNN International, Univision, International Rescue Committee, the United Nations, and The New Museum.
She is currently working on her first feature film back on her home island of Puerto Rico. The film, Matininó, tells the story of a multi-generational family of women transforming their experience with domestic violence and misogyny into a science fiction film.
Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, Silvia Castaño is a Latinx artist bridging the divides between activism, poetry, and filmmaking. Her activism and art are both grounded in community, justice, and self-determination. Castaño’s short film Ocean, a visual poem depicting a queer love story of a trans man and a cis woman, won a jury prize for documentary at the Laredo International Media & Film Festival in 2018. Her debut feature, Hummingbirds, is a uniquely collaborative autobiographical documentary directed by her and Estefanía Contreras about a summer in their lives coming of age on the Texas-Mexico border. The film is being made in a collaborative anti-hierarchical filmmaking approach, with teams of mostly first-time filmmakers sharing key roles and credits with more experienced mentor-collaborators. On top of being a 2022 BAVC Fellow, Castaño is also a 2021 NBCU Original Voices Fellow and a 2021 CIFF LEF Fellow.
Born in Paris, France, and raised in Jacmel (Haiti), New York, Miami and the Bay Area, Yeelen Cohen is a non-binary, multidisciplinary actor, producer, writer, and theater artist based in Brooklyn. The majority of their work explores larger conversations around identity, space, diaspora, and history. Building from this commitment, they co-founded and curated the Afrofuturism Film Festival in 2016, Assistant Directed the Haitian magical-neorealist feature Ayiti Mon Amour, and recently starred in Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. They won the mention prize award for Best Pitch at the Blackstar Film festival and were a fellow at the 2020-2021 Black Public Media 360 incubator. Their project Fighting for the Light will be supported by the 2022 BAVC Fellowship program. In it, Cohen intends to journey to Bamako to make a film about the enigmatic elder who inspired their name.
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados whose work focuses on giving rooted and nuanced voice to the Caribbean, pockets of subtropical Black life across the American South, and other marginalized, equatorial, Afro-diasporic spaces. As a filmmaker, Jeffers has produced award-winning shorts such as Papa Machete and Swimming in Your Skin Again that have screened at film festivals such as Sundance, BlackStar, TIFF, Sheffield and more. In addition to filmmaking, Jeffers is also a co-founder of the Miami-based Caribbean filmmaking collective Third Horizon, which stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. The 2022 BAVC Fellowship will support Jeffers in the development of his upcoming feature-length documentary debut, The First Plantation, in which he’ll profile the oldest continuously-operated sugar plantation in the Americas that paved the way for much of what we know of slavery and white supremacy in the western hemisphere.
For more information on this year’s BAVC MediaMakers fellows, visit www.bavc.org/programs/mediamaker/.
