Join filmmakers Leah Galant, Crystal Kayiza, and Jalena Keane-Lee for an hour-long conversation on documentary filmmaking – how do you make a documentary film, which may focus on a community you do not belong to, in an ethical way?

Leah’s background includes becoming a 2017 Sundance Ignite Fellow which offers an intensive year long mentorship program for emerging filmmakers and a 2019 Film Independent Documentary Fellow. Leah’s work has been featured on the NY Times, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Salon, MovieMaker Magazine and earned Vimeo Staff Picks. While a student at Ithaca College, she was named Variety magazine’s “110 Students to Watch in Film and Media” for her work on The Providerand Beyond the Wall.  The Provider is about the story of a traveling abortion provider in Texas.  The Provider won a Student Emmy Award and screened at various festivals including SXSW and Palm Springs Shortfest.  She was the Fall 2016 inaugural Sally Burns Shenkman Women Filmmaker Fellow at Jacob Burns Film Center where she completed my latest projects Kitty and Ellen (DOC NYC 2017) and Death Metal Grandma (SXSW 2018, NY Times Op-Docs) which won Best Documentary at the American Pavilion during the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 new faces of independent film,” She is a recipient of the 2017 Jacob Burns Film Center Woman Filmmaker Fellowship and the 2018 Sundance Ignite Fellowship. Her film, Edgecombe, received the 2018 Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where it was acquired for distribution by the PBS series POV. Her most recent short film, See You Next Time, was an official selection for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Crystal received a Heartland Emmy Award in 2012 for her film All That Remains, a portrait of Boley, Oklahoma, one of the nation’s last all-Black towns.

Jalena Keane-Lee is a social justice filmmaker and the spring 2018 Sally Burns Shenkman Woman Filmmaker Fellow. Her work has addressed issues such as indigenous land rights, destigmatizing menstruation, the importance of campus activism, and the meaning of consent. Jalena co-founded Breaktide Productions, a production company run by women of color dedicated to democratizing filmmaking by making content that elevates underrepresented voices on camera and behind the scenes. Her writing has been featured in Seventeen Magazine, The Tempest and NBC.com, and she has made films all around the world, from Hawaii and Prague, to Yangon, which have gone on to be award-winning shorts.

Registration will cut off 30 minutes before the workshop’s start time so that there is adequate time for everyone to receive a Zoom link.

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