Tff And Tfi Announce Winners Of 2009 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Awards Tfi Sloan Filmmaker Fund Recipients

This evening at the Tribeca All Access Awards at City Winery in lower Manhattan, the following winners were announced:

•    Narrative section prize – Miguel Aviles for “Somnium,” in which one man confronts his darkest fears, through his dreams, in order to salvage his life and get his true love back.
•    Emerging Narrative section prize – Andrew Bui for “Bronxopolis,” in which a geeky Vietnamese teen turns his crush on his Dominican neighbor into a comic book character that is far from their lives in the Bronx.
•    Documentary section prize – George Reyes for “La Muneca Fea (The Ugly Doll),” in which a group of elderly sex workers in Mexico City seek peace and find community at a refuge established by a former colleague.
•    Screenwriting section prize – Jinho Ferreira aka “Piper” for “Walter’s Boys,” in which a clandestine training operation led by an ex-CIA agent recruits urban teens, but faces treacherous consequences from the trainees’ intent to break free with the help of a former mentor.

Honorable mentions were given to:

•    Narrative – Jennifer Phang for “Look For Water,” in which a couple wakes up one morning to find they have literally lost sight of one another, igniting a path to rediscover each other and others lost along the way.
•    Emerging Narrative – Hugo Perez for “The Immaculate Conception,” in which the death of Maria’s popstar husband Poblito, leaves her with the chance to make a decision that may finally bring her happiness, but requires some divine intervention.
•    Documentary – Stephen Maing for “High Tech, Low Life,” in which truth and potential fame motivates a young Chinese vegetable seller to become China’s first citizen reporter, covering controversial and censored news via his blog, digital camera and blackberry.

The winners were selected from 21 eligible projects from the 27 in the program and based on the strength of their vision and filmmaking promise.  The 2009 TAA Creative Promise Award comes with a prize of $11,000 for narrative, documentary and emerging narrative and $7,000 for screenwriting as well as an original piece of art from a contemporary artist.  All of the filmmakers participating in the program have scripts or documentary proposals for which they are seeking funding and/or representation. 

"The caliber of talent of Tribeca All Access’ filmmakers continues to amaze us," said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Institute. “I am proud that TAA is helping to bring these voices and visions to the forefront - ultimately enhancing all of our film experiences.”

“Like the rest of the Tribeca All Access program, tonight was a celebration that all of the participants could say they felt as if they were a winner.  We’ve accomplished a lot in just this week and will continue to pave the way for our filmmakers to collaborate amongst themselves and with the industry as a whole,” said Tamir Muhammad, Director of Tribeca All Access.

2009 Tribeca All Access participants were selected from a pool of more than 475 submissions, and six projects through international associations.  A jury of respected industry professionals selected the four winners and three honorable mentions.  Since its founding in May 2004, TAA has supported the careers of more than 155 filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities within the film industry and facilitated 2,432 one-on-one meetings for them with key industry personnel.  From 2004 – 2008, a total of 158 projects have participated in TAA. 

Jurors for this year’s Tribeca All Access included Viola Davis, Sanaa Lathan, Fenton Bailey, Anne Carey, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Luis Guzman, Darnell Martin, Amy Robinson, Ellen Kuras, Lola Ogunnaike and Lance Reddick.

Author, L’Oréal Spokesperson and Unicef Ambassador Dayle Haddon presented Jennifer Phang with the L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth “Vision” Award for her screenplay “Look For Water,” which also received an honorable mention in the narrative category.  Female writers/directors actively participating in the emerging narrative section of the 2009 TAA program were eligible for the award, and Phang received a limited edition compact designed by Carelle and a $15,000 cash award from L’Oréal Paris to help further her creative vision through filmmaking.

TFI Adrienne Shelly Foundation Screenwriting Fellowship

As part of the Adrienne Shelly Foundation’s mission to aid in the advancement of talented women filmmakers, the foundation has teamed with the Tribeca Film Institute to form the TFI Adrienne Shelly Foundation Screenwriting Fellowship.  The fellowship will be awarded to one selected Tribeca All Access filmmaker to further her career and creative projects.  A total of $5,000 will be awarded in addition to support and mentorship throughout a 10-month period.  The late actress’ husband Andy Ostroy, who also serves as Executive Director of the foundation, and advisory board member Emily Deschanel presented the award to Ana Lily Amirpour for “The Stones,” in which class, tradition and love all violently collide in modern day Tehran, as a young working class girl embarks on a forbidden love with a wealthy young man with fatal consequences. 

“It is truly an honor to be partnering with the Tribeca Film Institute on this new fellowship,” said Ostroy. “Adrienne lived and worked in Tribeca, so it’s an especially meaningful addition to her growing legacy that the foundation that bears her name will be helping other talented women achieve their own filmmaking dreams through TAA.” Ostroy is producing Ms. Shelly’s follow-up script to her 2007 hit film WAITRESS, SERIOUS MOONLIGHT, which is directed by Cheryl Hines, stars Meg Ryan and Tim Hutton, and has its world premiere April 25th at the Tribeca Film Festival.   

Jurors for this year included Annie Sundberg, Michelle Byrd and Adam Brightman.

Also, Tribeca All Access, together with 46664 and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, announced the first annual Mandela Day Tribeca All Access Award.  TAA filmmakers, both present participants and alumni, are invited to submit original short film works to compete for grants from 46664 for future film projects.  The opportunity will encourage filmmakers to bring Nelson Mandela’s values to life in cinematic form, helping people to recognize their individual power to make an imprint and change the world around them.  Submissions will open June 8, 2009, and five winners will be selected to receive the Mandela Day Tribeca All Access Award, a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to put toward the making of a short film.  Recipients of the Mandela Day Tribeca All Access Award will have the opportunity to have their completed film shown at a special Tribeca All Access screening event during the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. 

Tribeca All Access provided this year’s 31 participating directors and screenwriters the opportunity to meet one-on-one with more than 100 potential investors, development executives, producers and agents in prescheduled meetings.  During the six-day event, Tribeca All Access arranged more than 430 meetings total for program participants.  For the second year, Tribeca All Access included international delegates by featuring six projects through its associations with the UK Film Council, Screen Australia (formerly Australian Film Commission) and Canadian Film Centre.

All participants in the 2009 program are now eligible to apply to “Tribeca Access OnTrack,” an expansion of the program designed to provide year-round support to TAA alumni.

TAA is made possible by Bloomberg.  Additional support is provided by Time Warner, L’Oréal Paris, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

2009 TRIBECA ALL ACCESS AWARD WINNERS

NARRATIVE

Miguel Aviles (Director, Screenwriter)
Somnium

When one man’s subconscious becomes jealous of his conscious, he must confront his darkest fears, through his dreams, in order to salvage his life and get his true love back.
Other Listed Crew: Michael Jasionowski (Producer, Editor)

HONORABLE MENTION

Jennifer Phang (Director, Screenwriter)
Look For Water

A couple wakes up one morning finding they have literally lost sight of each other, igniting them on a path to rediscover each other and others lost along the way.
Other Listed Crew: Dominc Mah (Screenwriter), Robert Chang (Executive Producer)

EMERGING NARRATIVE

Andrew Bui (Director, Screenwriter)
Bronxopolis

A geeky Vietnamese teenager turns his crush on his sassy Dominican neighbor into a comic book character that is far from the lives they grow into in the Bronx.

HONORABLE MENTION

Hugo Perez (Director, Screenwriter)
Immaculate Conception

When her popstar husband Pablito dies during a plastic surgery operation, Maria is left with a decision that may finally bring her happiness but requires a little divine intervention.
Other Listed Crew: Katharyn B. Marquez (Producer), Nick Spicer (Producer), Francisco Bello (Editor)

DOCUMENTARY

George Reyes (Co-Director, Producer)
La Muneca Fea (The Ugly Doll)

A group of elderly sex workers in Mexico City seek peace and find community behind the walls of Casa Xochiquetzal, a refuge established by one of their former colleagues.
Other Listed Crew: Claudia Lopez (Co-Director, Assoc. Producer), Nekisa Cooper (Producer)

HONORABLE MENTION

Stephen Maing (Director, Producer, DP)
High Tech, Low Life

Truth and potential fame motivates a young Chinese vegetable seller to become China’s first citizen reporter covering the country’s controversial and censored news stories via his blog, digital camera, and blackberry.
Other Listed Crew: Anne Marie Stein (Consulting Producer), Meng Xie (Field Producer), Jian Yi (Consulting Producer), Kirsten Johnson (Consulting Producer)

SCREENWRITING

Jinho Ferreira aka “Piper” (Screenwriter)
Walter’s Boys

A clandestine training operation run by an ex-CIA agent recruits urban teens, but faces treacherous consequences from the trainee’s intent on breaking free with the help of a former mentor. 

L’ORÉAL PARIS WOMEN OF WORTH “VISION” AWARD

Jennifer Phang (Director, Screenwriter)
Look For Water

A couple wakes up one morning finding they have literally lost sight of each other, igniting them on a path to rediscover each other and others lost along the way.
Other Listed Crew: Dominc Mah (Screenwriter), Robert Chang (Executive Producer)

TFI ADRIENNE SHELLY FOUNDATION SCREENWRITING FELLOWSHIP

Ana Lily Amirpour (Director, Screenwriter)
The Stones

In modern day Tehran, class, tradition, and love all violently collide as a young working class girl embarks on a forbidden love with a wealthy young man with fatal consequences.
Other Listed Crew: Gordy Hoffman (Producer), Sina Sayyah (Producer)

The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) also  announced, at an awards ceremony at City Winery for the Tribeca Film Institute, during the eighth annual Tribeca Film Festival, the selection of five film projects to receive financial and creative support from the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Out of 138 applications submitted, the five projects chosen will receive a total of $170,000 with development assistance and mentorship from film and science experts.  The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund supports feature-length narrative projects that tell compelling stories about science and technology or portray scientists, engineers and mathematicians as major characters.

The projects were selected by a committee made up of Marc Abraham (Director, Flash of Genius) Dr. Bonnie Bassler (Molecular Biologist, Princeton University), Sarah Green (Producer, The Tree of Life), Famke Janssen (Actress, X-Men), Dr. Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine), Dr. Robert Engle (Nobel Prize in Economics) and John Hart (Producer, Revolutionary Road).

At the awards ceremony, Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation and Jurors, Famke Janssen, Marc Abraham and Bonnie Bassler announced the following projects selected for funding:

EYED - $40,000

BANKER TO THE POOR - $40,000

THEY’RE PLAYING BASKETBALL - $15,000

EXPERIMENTER: THE STANLEY MILGRAM STORY - $35,000

SUGAR PILL - $40,000

"Through the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, we are afforded the opportunity to provide funding at a critical time in the industry to compelling stories with scientific themes,” said Jane Rosenthal, Co-Chairman of the Board, TFI.  “We welcome all of the projects selected by the committee to the Tribeca family and hope that this funding will have an impact on seeing these projects come to fruition.”

“We are delighted to join with Tribeca for the eighth year and to support  these five outstanding film projects which span such a wide range of subject matter, character and genre,” said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director. “This is one of the best crops of science films we’ve seen, demonstrating once again that science and technology offer fertile ground for filmmakers willing to dig beneath the surface and find the common human stories and passions that drive us to understand ourselves and improve our lot in the world.”

“Too often the definitive units of study, science and mathematics, are reduced to caricature in service of story when they should be an integral part,” said committee member John N. Hart.

Films funded tell stories of a team of flailing non-atletes who conquer college basketball by using an infallible mathematical formula, a Nobel Peace Prize winning economist who founds a revolutionary bank in Bangladesh to help the poorest borrowers take out micro-loans, the disturbing conclusions of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking obedience experiments at Yale University, an angry young man’s coming of age as a rare and incurable blindness takes over his life, and the reawakening of an emotionally paralyzed man who has made a career out of abusing the drug testing system in medical research facilities.

EYED - eyed by Ryan Knighton is adapted by him from his highly acclaimed memoir with the same title. The story is tough, tender, and darkly comic as Ryan crashes into life while going slowly blind, and trying to save his brother Rory from drugs, alcohol, and a really bad girlfriend. In the end Ryan finds his own way forward and a wonderful woman who makes him stronger by refusing to pity his tangled life and loss of sight.

Attachments:

Director: Jodie Foster

Screenwriter: Ryan Knighton

Producer: Jody Hotchkiss

BANKER TO THE POOR - The story of a man who fights to make his dream come true. He sets up an innovative and revolutionary bank, "the Grameen," in Bangladesh to lend tiny sums to the poorest people, without asking for guarantees. At the beginning nobody believes in him. Economists and scientists think he is a fool and will fail quickly. After 15 years, the world finally realizes his incredible invention, one of the most important of the 21st century. His invention has already saved millions of people from poverty.

Attachments:

Director: Marco Amenta

Screenwriter: Sergio Donati

THEY’RE PLAYING BASKETBALL - It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game, but who says you have to play the game the way everyone else does? An experiment in equality inspires an unconventional coach and a reclusive math professor to revolutionize the game of basketball through egalitarianism and algorithms. This experiment becomes known as "The System," and it is an unyielding attack of mathematics against conventional sports wisdom - a frenzied game of ordered chaos that transforms a rag-tag team of athletic misfits into conference champions. Who needs starters when you have statistics?

Attachments:

Screenwriter/Producer: Sam Lobel

Producers: Marc Lebowitz, Kerry Barden

EXPERIMENTER: THE STANLEY MILGRAM STORY - A prismatic portrait of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter comes to terms with Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments at Yale in which he tested how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an authority figure and even though it conflicted with his strongest moral imperatives.

Attachments:

Screenwriter: Michael Almereyda

Producer: Jennifer Fox

SUGAR PILL

Two men enter a medical research facility to test a drug that has never been used in humans before. Strangers at the start, they find their lives increasingly intertwined as the physical threat to one breaks the long emotional coma of the other, and together they struggle for release--both of body and of soul.

Attachments:

Writer/Director: Lisa Krueger

Producers: Ted Hope, Anne Carey

TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund Readings

The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund will present a reading of excerpts from 2009 grantee screenplays eyed, Experimenter and Sugar Pill and from 2008 grantees Alva and Radioactive Boy Scout (project information to follow) on Sunday April 26th at 3:30 pm at the Helen Mills Theater, followed by a tail reception. This event is invitation only but is open to all TFF accredited industry. The readings will be directed by Evan Cabnet, casted by David Caparelliotis, and performed by a star cast, including Chris Abbott, Remy Auberjonois, Kate Burton, Tanya Fisher, David Harbour, and David Wilson Barnes.

The 2008 project details are as follows:

Alva

Writers: Alex Lyras, Michael Dorian

Logline: Was Thomas Edison America’s greatest inventor, or a clever thief with a pioneering acumen for marketing? Alva explores the life of Edison from a precocious young rule breaker, to the full blown ‘Wizard of Menlo Park.’

Radioactive Boy Scout

Writer/Director: Greg Harrison; Producers: Danielle Renfrew, William Horberg

Logline: Based on the true story of a 16-year-old Boy Scout in Michigan who, in 1995, attempted to build the core of a nuclear reactor in his backyard shed and was shut down by the Federal government.

Submissions for the 2010 TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund open October 2009 and will be accepted through December 2009 (postmark deadline). Fund recipients will be announced in the spring of 2010. Visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org for further rules and information on submissions.

About the Tribeca Film Institute

The Tribeca Film Institute creates innovative programs that draw on the unifying power of film to promote understanding, tolerance and global awareness.  Our commitment is to educate, entertain and inspire filmmakers and audiences alike, while strengthening the artistic and economic fabric of New York City and its Lower Manhattan community.
  
For more information visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org.

About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The New York based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded in 1934, makes grants in science, technology, economics and the quality of American life. Sloan’s program in public understanding of science and technology, directed by Doron Weber, supports books, radio, film, television, theater and the Internet to reach a wide, non-specialized audience.

Sloan’s partnership with Tribeca forms part of a broader national program by the Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television and theater to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. Over the past ten years, Sloan has partnered with six of the top film schools in the country—AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU, UCLA and USC—and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production. In addition to the Tribeca/Sloan Screenplay Development Program, which has initiated such film projects as Face Value, the Hedy Lamarr story, slated for shooting in January, the Foundation has sponsored screenwriting and film production workshops at Sundance, the Hamptons and Film Independent and honored new feature films such as the forthcoming Adam (Fox Searchlight) and recent films such as Flash of Genius, Sleep Dealer, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Sloan is also a longtime supporter of new science plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater and Manhattan Theater Club, of the John Adams’ opera Dr. Atomic and of the upcoming World Science Festival. For more information, please visit www.sloan.org.

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