Image from the Anna Borges do Sacramento project
The nonprofit Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program recently announced its latest cohort of twenty nonfiction projects to receive Sundance Institute Documentary Fund Grants, which included four U.S. Latinx and Latin American projects, from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Cuba, and Guatemala. A total of $600,000 in unrestricted grant support has been provided to the projects in various stages of production and distribution that address issues of identity, politics, and history both in the region and in the United States.
Afro-Cuban anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Aída Bueno Sarduy has been selected for support in the development stage of her film Anna Borges do Sacramento. A co-production of Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain and produced by Paula Zyngierman and Leandro Listorti, the documentary will trace the history of Anna Borges do Sacramento, an Afro-descendant Brazilian slave who brought a civil action against her first owner to maintain her “free” status acquired 16 years earlier. Her history, archived and practically unknown, reveals the iniquity of the legal devices that for centuries sustained the legality of Brazil’s pervasive slave system.
Ecuadorean filmmaker Ricardo Ruales and producers Soledad Santelices and Matteo Pecorara have been granted a development award for their project The Broken R, an Italian-Ecuadorian co-production. As Ruales states, “From the speech therapy process that I took, many questions about the voice arose, about my own voice and how it sounded.” The Broken R is an intimate family portrait that attempts to confront the search about questioning oneself, and above all questioning one’s own voice, and understanding it as identity.
New York-based Guatemalan visual journalist Gerardo del Valle has also been awarded development support for his film The Past is Waiting Up Ahead. Revisiting the route that poet Javier Zamora traveled as an unaccompanied minor when he was eight years old, Zamora takes it upon himself to confront his past and discover how the undocumented route from Central America to the United States has changed in the last twenty years.
Last, but certainly not least, Mexican-American filmmaker JoeBill Muñoz has received production support for his project Untitled Prison Hunger Strike Film, co-directed with Lucas Guilkey. Muñoz’s feature documentary, currently in the middle of production, traces the rise and fall of California’s system of indefinite solitary confinement.
The Sundance Documentary Fund offers non-recoupable support for the work of international nonfiction filmmakers that, in the words of the granting organization, “continue to elevate and advance cultural dialogue and break new ground in creativity and innovation from filmmakers with a distinct voice and vision, and a meaningful connection to the work they create.” In a changing media landscape, the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund has been a notable force in supporting work that engages with audiences and the world at large in creative, complex, and provocative ways, while also coalescing real cultural and social impact around some of the most pressing issues of our time.
