Award winning ecology and culture publication Emergence Magazine and IF/Then Shorts, an initiative of Field of Vision, have announced today the selected projects for the inaugural SHIFTING LANDSCAPES – Emergence Magazine x IF/Then Shorts Lab. The lab celebrates stories that explore widespread shifts in movement and landscape from both human and nonhuman perspectives.
The three finalists will each receive $25,000 in grant support, mentorship, and access to career advancing networking opportunities to assist in the completion and distribution of their projects, as well as a guaranteed secondary distribution window online with Emergence Magazine.
Marking the first partnership between IF/Then Shorts and Emergence Magazine, and funded by Kalliopeia Foundation, the lab spotlights place-specific community conscious stories of migration.
The three projects span transient beekeepers in China, a life changing connection between an Indian artist and Japanese curator, and teenaged activists on puffin patrol in Iceland. Each will benefit from the resources of top mentors – including prominent voices in documentary as well as topic-area experts – as well as build strong creative relationships based on mutual feedback and support with their fellow filmmakers.
Upon completing a rough cut of their projects, filmmakers will be invited to screen their works-in-progress for an invitation-only audience of programmers, broadcasters, and commissioning editors at a prominent international film festival. For the remainder of the program, filmmakers will finalize their cuts and receive high-level festival and distribution strategy consultations.
Emergence Magazine’s Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee said, “These three compelling projects each offer a unique and creative expression of the ways migration is shifting our relationship with the human and more than human world. We are very excited to collaborate with and support these talented filmmakers and their projects.”
“We’re sincerely delighted to bring these three exceptional projects together, expanding creative community across borders and timezones to showcase the brilliance and potential of creators working in short form,” said Caitlin Mae Burke, Co-
Director of IF/Then. Adds Co-Director Merrill Sterritt, “After a difficult and often isolating two years for many in our field, we couldn’t be more excited to spend 2022 creating a supportive space for the collaborative relationships and outstanding films that will emerge from this talented international cohort.”
The selected projects are:
Bee Together
Director: Pan Zhiqi, Producer: Jia Zhao, Co-Producer: Tae Yamamoto. Location: China. In China, beekeepers are constantly on the move in order to find a good source of honey for their bees and good financial returns. But the industry is facing many challenges due to climate change and monoculture farming. This film follows a young beekeeper, Xiao Long, and his family as they migrate with bees in search of honey, witnessing the survival of beekeepers in the face of an ecological crisis.
Detour
Director: Tushar Madhav, Producer: Jia Zhao, Locations: India, Japan. An Indian painter and a Japanese curator encounter each other in their crossings between the forest and the city. Caught at the intersection, while the painter slips into depression and takes the path of suicide, the curator pursues his life away from modern civilization inside a forest. A tale of outcasts of contemporary society, Detour reflects the abyss of an artist’s soul in a world of dogmas.
Puffling
Director: Jessica Bishopp, Producers: Gannesh Rajah, Alice Hughes, Co-Producer: Ada Benjaminsdottir, Locations: Iceland, UK. On a remote island off the coast of Iceland, teenagers take it upon themselves to counteract the damaging human impact on nature, exchanging night-time parties for nocturnal puffin patrols – in a coming of age story of joy and jeopardy for young adults and pufflings alike.
About the Shifting Landscapes
The Shifting Landscapes open call took in Jan/Feb 2022, and was open to original, standalone documentary shorts in production. This opportunity was open globally to individuals with genuine connection to and credibility within the communities they depict on-screen telling place-specific, community conscious stories of migration, with an emphasis on Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+ folks, recent immigrants, undocumented persons, persons with a disability, and/or women.
To meet eligibility requirements, projects must be an original documentary with a duration of 10-30 minutes, eligible for completion within the year-long lab with an interest in collaborative creation, follow best practices in documentary ethics, authentically represent the story featured in the film, presented in English or have English subtitles, and have no prior distribution attached.
For more information: fieldofvision.org/emergence2022
