Arts: Visual and Performing

Alonso Llosa, MFA

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, FILM AND MEDIA

Lagarto, a narrative short film

Lagarto is a narrative short film that follows a woman’s search for her deceased father’s body in an abandoned mining camp in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. The film explores the theme of abandonment from dual perspectives: the personal abandonment experienced by a child from a parent, and the environmental abandonment inflicted by those entrusted with its care. The film will be shot entirely in the outskirts of the city of Puerto Maldonado in Peru and the majority of the crew will be Peruvian. The completed project will serve both as a standalone short film and as a proof of concept for Discoman: The Voice of the Jungle, a narrative feature film with a runtime of 90 minutes. Presenting the film at international film festivals will serve as significant accolades for both myself and Emory University's Film and Media department. More importantly, however, will be the opportunity to expose audiences to the increasingly deteriorating conditions of the Amazon rainforest.

Malinda Lowery, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, HISTORY

Black, Native, and Southern Foodways

Black, Native, and Southern Foodways is a documentary film project focusing on Black and Indigenous foodways in the U.S. southeast. My proposal to the URC funds the second phase of the project, which includes post-production and additional travel for a 30-minute documentary film suitable for screenings in cultural centers, schools, and community institutions, as well as film festivals. Through historical and ethnobotanical research with Black and Native North Carolinians, this film seeks to answer an urgent question for the health and welfare of these communities and the land they steward: what will it take to re-Indigenize southern food and the food system? The film demonstrates how Black and Native people in the American southeast are reconnecting to one another after centuries of forced separation; how farmers, chefs, and herbalists are reclaiming their food traditions and restoring ecosystems with heirloom ingredients; how they are taking charge of the southern food story; and how they are advocating to change a food system which has brought disastrous health outcomes to people and their environments. Using ingredients created in the Americas and those that migrated here from around the world, the film shows these traditionally marginalized communities taking center stage to navigate identity, memory, and belonging in a Southern landscape shaped by colonization and displacement.

James Pellerito, MFA

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, FILM AND MEDIA

Outside Hitter

Outside Hitter is a feature documentary project about unsung, queer, African-American, 1984 Olympic volleyball star, Flo Hyman.  My objective with this request for funding is to create a 10 to 20 minute fundraising trailer for the project, allowing me to apply for additional funding beyond Emory.  A three-time college All-American at the University of Houston, Hyman was the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship.  She later played professional volleyball in Japan, where she became a huge sports star and fashion model.  Hyman advocated for the Civil Rights Restoration Act and Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in collegiate athletics.  The National Girls and Women in Sports Day (NGWSD) which celebrates all women athletes, was originated in her honor in 1987.  Hyman, 6’5”, died of an apparent heart attack, in the most dramatic and unforgiving way possible, on the court during a volleyball match in 1986.  The autopsy later revealed that she suffered from Marfan Syndrome, which caused a fatal aortic dissection.  Her impact on all of sport, not just volleyball, remains immeasurable, and her death brought critical media attention to Marfan Syndrome, even saving the lives of some of her family members.

Mariya Vlasova, MFA

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, OXFORD COLLEGE, HUMANITIES DIVISION

Frozen Time Mountain

My project is an experimental film exploring tourist desire with a specific focus on the disappearing glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park (GNP). I am particularly interested in our collective anxiety about losing the natural world and the documentation of this anxiety in the act of the tourist taking pictures. I will work with found images and films ranging from tourist snapshots and View-Master reels to historical and scientific photographs documenting and studying glaciers. Interwoven within my film, these images will create an eclectic homage to lost and quickly disappearing landscapes, a visual artifact of a collective desire to stop time, and a reckoning with human-induced climate change.