Announcing the 2011 Mountainfilm Commitment Grant Recipients
The five winning 2011 grantees are:
Suzan Beraza: Uranium Drive In
Beraza’s feature-length documentary film, Uranium Drive In, is about a boom-bust uranium mining community in rural, southwestern Colorado and the heated battle there over a new proposed uranium mill – the first, if approved, to be built in the United States in over 25 years. Read more...
Hal Clifford and Jason Houston: Picture the Leviathan
Clifford and Houston have collaborated on short documentaries that have screened at Mountainfilm such as Stone River and Eel/Water/Rock/Man. Their next project is Picture the Leviathan, a short documentary film about James Prosek, the author of eleven books, winner of a Peabody Award, and well established as an artist by the time he finished college. Prosek paints in the tradition of nineteenth-century naturalists who catalogued the world as it was discovered. But he paints creatures that are vanishing. Read more...
Ben Knight and Travis Rummel: Amend
Mountainfilm helped inspire the award-winning Felt Soul Media team to make documentaries such as Running Down the Man, Red Gold, and Eastern Rises. This grant will go towards their next film, tentatively titled, Amend, which is about a national movement to bring down dams across North America. Read more...
Drew Ludwig: Japan Tsunami
Photographer Ludwig will travel the northeast coast of Japan by foot to explore the intersection between art and activism in the debris of this year’s tsunami. At Mountainfilm 2011, Ludwig’s exhibited his memorable photography exhibit of gloves that he found as he walked through Louisiana after the Gulf Oil spill. Ludwig will shoot portraits of those who lived through the tsunami’s devastation and hopes to capture both the enormity of the wave and the vulnerability of the subjects. Read more...
Allison Otto and Carole Snow: Keeper of the Mountains
Otto’s and Snow’s documentary film, Keeper of the Mountains, is about the legendary Everest historian, Elizabeth Hawley, now in her late 80’s. The filmmakers have been filming and interviewing the Grande Dame of the Himalayas about her unique vantage on mountaineering history. Read more...
You can read about the 2010 Mountainfilm Commitment grantees here.
Mountainfilm has committed to help creative individuals tell stories that represent the spirit of the festival. Grants go to filmmakers, photographers, artists and adventurers whose projects are intended to move audiences to action on issues that matter. Interested parties should apply if they’re creating a work that can be presented in a theater, gallery or more broadly on television and online. We are particularly looking for projects that will have a positive and tangible effect on specific and vital issues. It is also essential that the project is invested with both the passion and capacity to be fully completed.
Five grant winners will each receive $5,000 and a MacBook Pro!
For 2010 & 2011 we considered letters from people who had either participated in Mountainfilm as a filmmaker or guest presenter or had been recommended by a Mountainfilm filmmaker or guest presenter. The 2012 granting cycle has not been determined yet.
Letters of interest must be no longer than 400 words. Longer letters will be disqualified.
The overarching intention of our granting program is to help ensure that important stories are not only told but also heard.
Creatively, we are interested in projects that:
- incorporate moving pictures, photos, words, art materials or a combination to tell a critical story.
- take audiences to places they’ve never been and tell them stories they’ve never heard.
- use unconventional approaches to form and process.
What we expect from our investments:
- short regular updates on progress with photos, clips, etc. in addition to a final presentation.
- a clear willingness to work with Mountainfilm to get the story out to a larger audience.
- a small thank you credit (on films, etc).
Letters of interest and questions should be directed to entries@mountainfilm.org.
The 2010 Grantees
Paradox Valley U.S.A. is a documentary about how the global “nuclear renaissance” is coming to a humble corner of America. George Glasier, a former mining executive turned rancher, and his business partners are poised to break ground in Paradox Valley, Colorado, on the first new uranium mill in this country since the Cold War. This is the story of the making—or the unmaking—of that mill. Read more...
