Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.
APRIL 26-28, 2022

CONGRATULATIONS to the 2022 PitchBLACK Award winners. Click here to view our press release announcing the winners and here for coverage of the event in Current.

Thanks to all who joined us for the 2022 PitchBLACK Forum and Awards program,  to our phenomenal emcee, Filmmaker/Comedian CJ Hunt, and finally to our a keynote speaker Filmmaker/Director/Producer Dawn Porter. The Awards ceremony’s salute to the 2022 BPM Trailblazer Award winner Orlando Bagwell was as inspiring as it was heartwarming and the pitches by this year’s traditional and immersive media makers were all powerful. BPM is pleased to have been able to award $225K in project funding and thanks our sponsors for making that possible.

5
4
6
Awards Ceremony
OUR SUPPORTERS

CONTACT US

Address
8 W. 126th St., Ste. 0D3117, NY, NY 10027

Email Us

Phone
(212) 234 – 8200

USEFUL LINKS

STAY INFORMED

Donate
Facebook-f Twitter Instagram Youtube
Sheila Walker’s ancestors were victims of a long enshrouded race massacre that still haunts Black and White descendants a century later. When she befriends the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman who took part in the killings, she sets out to Elaine, Ark., the roots of the trauma, intent on breaking the silence.

The Filmmakers

Llewellyn Smith has written, produced and directed groundbreaking documentary films for over 30 years and received numerous broadcasting honors, including the DuPont and Peabody Awards, and the Kavli Science Journalism Award (filmography here). His latest project “Inside the Black Box” interrogates the role of A.I. in predictive policing and courtroom justice. In 2020, Black Public Media named him among its 40th Anniversary Black Media Game Changers. He is co-founder with Dr. Anne Stopford of BlueSpark Collaborative LLC, an independent company dedicated to film and research.

Bound by Blood — Echoes of the Elaine Massacre

Franziska Blome is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose career launched 25 years ago at WGBH Boston with Africans in America, a four-part series on slavery. Ever since, she has worked on many highly acclaimed PBS films in both production and post production (filmography here). After years of freelancing as researcher and producer, Franziska decided in 2015 to shift her career more towards her passion for editing.
Brigidy Bram is a wild rags-to-riches tale circling psychosis and genius. The story of prolific painter Kendal Hanna reveals a case study of how we institutionalize difference.

The Filmakers

Kareem J. Mortimer is an award-winning Caribbean director and video artist. His work has been distributed in over 50 countries and includes his coming-of-age debut feature, the 18 festival award-winning Children of God; the family comedy, Wind Jammers; and most recently, Cargo, which has won five awards and has had successful theatrical releases in 10 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean Basin.

Brigidy Bram: The Life and Mind of Kendal Hanna

Laura Gamse‘s debut documentary, The Creators: South Africa Through the Eyes of Her Artists, was named “Best Documentary” at the National Geographic All Roads Film Festival. Her work has been featured on NPR, the National Geographic Channel, and Netflix. As the producer of the Misfit Economy, Laura developed the project into Underworld Inc., a National Geographic Channel series on innovation in the underground econoy. Laura directed and co-produced the short form incarnation of Brigidy Bram in 2021, which was named “Best Short Film” at the Bahamian Oscars.
Hollow Tree is about three teenagers coming of age in their sinking homeland of Louisiana. For the first time, they notice the Mississippi River’s engineering, stumps of cypress trees, and billowing smokestacks. Their different perspectives — as Indigenous, White, and Angolan young women — shape their story of the climate crisis.

Hollow Tree

The Filmmakers

Kira Akerman lives and works in New Orleans. Her short film Station 15 (2017) screened on PBS, a Smithsonian Exhibit across Louisiana, The Climate Museum in NYC, DocNYC, Imagine Science Film Fest, Sheffield Doc Fest, and the UN Global Climate Summit in 2018. Her short film, The Arrest (2018), is featured in “The Atlantic” and exhibited in  “Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana” at The Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York.
Monique Walton is an independent producer of fiction and nonfiction films. She produced Bull, directed by Annie Silverstein, which premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard, and went on to receive three top awards at the 2019 Deauville American Film Festival, including the Grand Jury prize.

Wednesdays in Mississippi examines the challenges and triumphs of bringing women together across the chasm of race, religion, and region to fight racial discrimination and for women’s rights.

The Filmmakers

Marlene McCurtis is a creative writer, filmmaker, teaching artist, and the director of Moving Forward, a documentary short about TheatreWorkers Project’s collaboration with Dads Back! Academy. She has directed TV shows for The Discovery Channel, A&E, Lifetime, NatGEO, and PBS. Her short film Here I’ll Stay, about a coalition of civil rights and Latino activists fighting for immigrant rights in Mississippi, is featured on the acclaimed web platform “Field of Vision.” The DGA member is an alum fellow of  Firelight Media’s Producers’ Lab and has an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University.
Joy Silverman has been involved in social justice activism and art her entire adult life. Raised in a small Jewish community in Florida during the Jim Crow era, she experienced what it was like to be the “other.” She has presented and produced cultural programs for over 35 years and has served as an executive at several nonprofit art institutions across the United States. Joy was one of the first producers on Wednesdays in Mississippi and has been involved in all aspects of the film, specifically fundraising, making connections for resources of in-kind services and relevant people and adding creative consult.

Wednesdays In Mississippi

Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl is a hybrid documentary that celebrates the life of chef Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor – a Gullah Geechee renaissance woman whose unconventional life took her from rural South Carolina Lowcountry to an international career involving major 20th century intellectual, artistic and social movements.

The Filmmakers

Julie Dash‘s groundbreaking film, Daughters of the Dust, is just one project in a prolific career that includes directing feature films, music videos, documentaries, commercial spots, PSA’s, and industrial films. She has written and directed movies for CBS, BET, ENCORE STARZ, SHOWTIME, MTV Movies, and HBO on projects including Incognito, Funny Valentines, Love Song, and Subway Stories: Tales From the Underground. Her highly acclaimed film The Rosa Parks Story can be found in most U.S. high schools. Julie’s design work includes a theme park pavilion for Disney’s Imagineering, and the immersive experience Brothers of the Borderland for The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum.
Rachel Watanabe-Batton is an independent producer and president of Contradiction and Struggle, a production and consulting company dedicated to telling authentic stories that reframe historical and cultural narratives. Over the course of her career, she has produced content and led industry workshops in North and South America, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Middle East. Her producing partnership with acclaimed film director Julie Dash has yielded multiple film and television projects, and she has produced films with auteur directors Tanya Hamilton (The Killers), The Polish Brothers (Bajo del Perro), and Mo Ogrodnik (Ripe).

Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl

Orlando Bagwell’s work reflects some of the industry’s most influential storytelling about the civil rights movement and the history of American race relations. His award-winning documentaries have captured the history of Black resistance — from slavery to the civil rights and Black power movements, to present-day stories of race and conflict in contemporary society. As a producer, director, funder, and mentor, he has had a profound impact on the American documentary landscape. His extensive filmography includes: two episodes of the groundbreaking Blackside series Eyes on the Prize (1987, Mississippi: Is this America? and Ain’t Scared of Your Jails); Roots of Resistance (1989); A Hymn for Alvin Ailey (1993); Malcolm X: Make it Plain (1994); Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History (1994) and the multi-part PBS series Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (1998).

2022 Trailblazer – Orlando Bagwell

Marco Williams is an award-winning director who has been creating films and telling impactful stories for a long time. His credits include: Crafting an Echo, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Lonnie Holley: The Truth of the Dirt, The Black Fives, The Undocumented, Inside the New Black Panthers; Banished; Freedom Summer; I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education; MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream; Two Towns of Jasper; Making Peace: Rebuilding our Communities; Declarations: The Spiritual Deficit and The American Dream; Without a Pass; In Search of Our Fathers; and From Harlem to Harvard.

2021 Trailblazer – Marco Williams

Award-winning Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and experience as a human rights attorney to tell compelling, deeply personal stories in a variety of media that resonate beyond the margins. Her work has appeared on broadcast and web platforms, including PBS, Showtime, New York Times Op-Docs, and MTV. Her documentary short, Elena, was featured in Season 13 of BPM’s AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange. She is the co-founder of Rada Film Group.
Producer and Director, Joe Brewster is a Harvard trained psychiatrist who uses his psychological training as the foundation in approaching the social issues he tackles as an artist and filmmaker. Brewster, in conjunction with his Rada Film Group co-founder, Michèle Stephenson, have created stories using installation, narrative, documentary and print mediums that have garnered support from critics and audiences internationally.

2019 Trailblazers – Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster

FORTY ACRES is an oral history journey of Black American farmers, land stewards and herbalists, and their evolving relationship to the land. For some Black people in the U.S., the land, particularly in the American South, has gone from being a space of forced manual labor on another man’s property to an opportunity for freedom through land ownership for young Black, LGBTQIA+ people. FORTY ACRES is the root of these stories, with each branch focusing on a deeper understanding of what land means to us, what laws and policies regulate land ownership and how these laws are applied, and lastly, what is the state of Black farmers and how, they and others, are fighting against climate change as it becomes more urgent.

Forty Acres

BY TAMARA SHOGAOLU

The Maker

Tamara Shogaolu is the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures. She is an international director and new media artist who strives to share stories across mediums, platforms, and virtual and physical spaces in order to promote cross-cultural understanding and challenge preconceptions. With a track record in featuring her work at film festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide, such as the Tribeca Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Indonesia, her innovative approach to storytelling has led to sources like The Guardian, Forbes Magazine and Vogue naming her as a leader in the field of new and immersive media. She was a 2018 Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs Fellow, a 2019 Gouden Kalf Nominee, a 2020 Creative Capital Award Recipient, and a 2020 Sundance New Frontier John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grantee. Tamara was a Burton Lewis Endowed Scholar for Directing at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she graduated with an MFA. Shogaolu was also a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, a Luce Scholar in Indonesia, and an Academy Nicholls Fellowship Semifinalist.

Rabiola Open Skies is an interactive VR experience about flying kites in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The story opens in a kite shop in the northern part of Rio. Paulo, the old man who owns the store, welcomes us inside. He starts telling us why he fell in love with the magic of flying kites, and we travel back in time to his childhood to see this experience through his eyes.

The Maker

Leonardo Souza is a Brazilian filmmaker, who works both in traditional film and in virtual reality. Based in Rio de Janeiro, Leonardo has edited VR films such as the 360 VR documentary, Children Do Not Play War, which debuted at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, and Decolonize Your Eyes, which premiered in 2019 at the U.N. General Assembly. He received an invitation from Dalberg Media to attend the 2019 edition of UNLEASH Innovation Lab, which was held in Shenzhen, China. Last year, Leonardo’s documentary, Um grito parado no ar [Unfinished Shout], debuted at The Black Cinema Meeting Zózimo Bulbul and was nominated for Best Documentary at the Human Rights Film Festival in Brazil.

illustratin of small kites flying over an urban landscape against a pink sky

Rabiola Open Skies

BY LEONARDO SOUZA

Ancestral Archives is a collection of chatbots that are created using the words of influential Black thinkers, leaders, and artists. By building a collection of chatbots trained on the work of Black leaders, like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, we hope to recontextualize and reintroduce their work to a new generation of critical thinkers, activists, and creators. The project primarily takes three manifestations: 1) Users actively engaging in one-on-one conversations with the chatbots, 2) passively observing conversations or performances between the bots, and 3) the creation of an archive to collect and preserve Black thought.

The Maker

Josie V. Williams is a multimedia creative technologist. Her practice involves experimenting with emerging technology, coding, and exploring cyborgian art forms as a medium of expression. She is influenced by radical techno-counterculture and technology as a liberatory tool based in indigenous knowledge. Black Public Media awarded her the 2021 Nonso Christian Ugbode Fellowship.

Ancestral Archives

BY JOSIE V. WILLIAMS

Wa’Omoni Rising Mindfulness is a relaxation and mindfulness experience to inspire and remind you to take a moment to enjoy the beauty around you. This experience takes you to the unspoiled and often unknown island of Barbuda, in the eastern Caribbean. Explore white sand, turquoise blue waters and deserted beaches, lush unique ecosystems and untouched breathtaking landscapes of Barbuda. Through gazed-based controls choose between a natural ambisonic soundscape, relaxing instrumental soundtrack or audio from elders sharing their stories and wisdom. You can activate a visual guide to assist with focusing on calm and focused breathing. As you spend time in each locale, you will gain an understanding and appreciation for Barbuda’s unique culture and precious environment currently at risk of drastic change.

Wa’Omoni Rising

BY NGARDY CONTEH GEORGE

The Maker

Co-founder of OYA Media Group, Sierra Leonean-Canadian Ngardy Conteh George is a two-time Canadian Screen Award winning filmmaker. She is committed to working with systematically excluded, and often unheard communities, especially those that represent the rich cultures and complexities of the African diaspora. Most recently, she directed, co-wrote and co-produced TV hour Mr. Jane and Finch (CBC, 2019), winner of two 2020 Canadian Screen Awards.
Cissie Gool House is a 360 documentary about a precarious housing occupation in an unused Cape Town hospital. When a group of activists take control of an abandoned hospital in a gentrifying neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa, it sparks a conversation about race and spatial justice in the city. The residents, represented by three women, dream of holding on to the hospital and building something new and inclusive, while the powers that be try everything to get them out.

Cissie Gool House

BY DYLAN VALLEY

The Maker

Dylan Valley is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator who views film as a liberatory tool. Currently a lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, he also is a doctoral student in media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 2013, he received a Pulitzer Fellowship from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where he received his master’s in specialized journalism. In January 2020, his virtual reality documentary, Azibuye – The Occupation, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He also has served on the selection committee for the Frontlight section of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

Hereborn Park is a dedicated virtual XR space for jubilation and wholeness through the lens of an online, cosmic theme park.
Hereborn Park: Cosmic Circle is Hereborn Park’s first virtual web XR experience of cosmic proportions, where visitors skate through a portal of memory, pain, and struggle beyond time and space. Cosmic Circle introduces the first icon of Hereborn Park, Kasama—a Cosmic guide who grants wayward souls facing existential crises a skating experience to transcend painful memories and struggles. She delivers them into the abyss of joy beyond time and space, offering us a moment to love, heal, and restore our relationship to our own past.

Hereborn Park

BY TONY PATRICK

The Maker

Tony Patrick is a writer and artist who specializes in worldbuilding. His practice revolves around creating innovative and culturally abundant future worlds. In additional to being an immersive experience director and Today@Apple NYC Youth Program Mentor, he’s also the founder of the Tenfold Gaming Initiative (which brings underrepresented students to game design/tech careers), an NYU ITP/IMA professor, writer of a a series of published comics (Batman & The Signal, X’ed), and is an author/director of numerous screenplays, short films and documentaries (HBO, Cinemax, CBC).