New York-based foundation Creative Capital has announced the winners of the 2021 Creative Capital Awards, presented to 35 projects by 42 individual artists, including three U.S. Latinx filmmakers: Shirley Bruno, William D. Caballero, and Débora Souza Silva. Each project will receive up to $50,000 in project funding, supplemented by additional career development services.
Brooklyn-based Shirley Bruno will be receiving support for the project Just Come/Been To, an experimental triptych film delving into the lives of three women, their inherited land conflicts and buried family legacies in Haiti. A mosaic tapestry of parallel storylines allow for in-between gaps in times where the ancestral, mythological, and physical worlds converge as the film reflects on one’s spiritual connection to a land, its primitive memories, and the Caribbean dilemma of exodus and return.
In her Bruno explores the philosophies, aesthetics, and rhythms of lived moments found distinctively in the Caribbean, particularly as they pertain to the lives of women. Drawing from her Haitian heritage, preserving and radicalizing ancestral traditions and mythologies, she creates and reimagines modern myths that expose the impermanence between the material and spiritual, documentary and fiction, and collective memory and history.
Bruno’s films are highly participatory in approach and take their point of departure from neglected histories as well as from rumors, dreams, superstitious beliefs, memories both real and imagined. Her films are included in the permanent collections of CNAP in France and Vidéographe in Montréal, and her works have been presented at Palais de Tokyo, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Villa Médici Rome among others. She is a NYC Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and holds master’s degrees from London Film School as well as Le Fresnoy—Studio National des Arts Contemporains, where she was also an artist-fellow.
TheyDream by Wiiliam D. Caballero
Los Angeles-based multimedia storyteller William D. Caballero won the Creative Capital Award with his animated documentary project TheyDream, about the hopes and realities of the artist’s Puerto Rican-American family, plagued by health, financial, and social problems rooted in the systemic inequality in today’s America. As a sequel to the filmmaker’s autobiographical documentary American Dreams Deferred, this new work features photo-realistic 3D modeled characters inhabiting hand-built environments, highlighting the stories of real people of color, meticulously rendered in miniature. TheyDream creates a social dialogue highlighting the struggles of those living in poverty, as well as Puerto Rican communities living in the USA today, indicative of today’s forgotten American narrative.
Caballero works primarily in the field of filmmaking featuring miniature 3D printed protagonists, and his work examines American and Latino gender/sexuality, and existential identity. His creative mantra is “empower, enlighten, and express”, and it underlies his desire to spread the gift of creativity amongst diverse people, liberating them from the oppression of mainstream tastes and values.
Born in Coney Island, New York and raised in North Carolina, Caballero obtained the Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship, and returned to New York City where he graduated from Pratt Institute and New York University. His animated projects have premiered on HBO, Univision, PBS, World Channel, and have debuted at hundreds of international film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art. Caballero received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.
Black Mothers by Débora Souza Silva
Documentary filmmaker and journalist Débora Souza Silva, based in Oakland, has received the award for her Black Mothers project, which reports on the “Mothers of the Movement,” a nationwide network of mothers whose African-American children were killed by police. The feature-length documentary follows the journey of two women working to disrupt the United States’s cycle of police brutality. As one mother navigates the turbulent aftermath of her son’s attack by police, the other channels her grief into organizing other mothers to fight for—and win—justice.
Souza Silva’s work examines systemic racism and inequality, while also highlighting the resilience of impacted communities. She started her career as an on-air television reporter and producer in her home country of Brazil, covering stories about race and social inequality. In 2016, Silva was awarded a fellowship with the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she produced a series of short documentaries focused on immigration and social justice.
Her work has been featured on PBS, BBC, Reveal News, KQED, and Fusion. She is a recipient of the Les Payne Founder’s Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and the New York Times Institute Fellowship. She is a recipient of the Gracie Award for the four-part documentary series The Aftermath, the Glassbreaker Films Fellowship, the Investigative Reporting Program Fellowship, and the Tribeca Film Institute All Access Grant. Silva is a fellow of the 2019 Firelight Media Lab and the 2020 (Egg)celerator Lab. Black Mothers is her debut feature-length film.
