The F Word: A Foster to Adopt Story, directed by Nico Opper

Season 1 of The F Word revealed the story of one queer couple adopting from foster care in Oakland, CA. Season 2 continues their story while amplifying other voices in the foster care world: birth families, foster youth, adoptees, adoptive parents of color, and social entrepreneurs working to repair a broken system.

Breathe, directed by Winslow Porter and Milica Zec*

A communal experience connecting us through the simple power of existence, Breathe transforms users into Rose, a young girl orphaned after a devastating war. Rose’s life changes drastically after the trauma of living out formative years inside a conflict zone. Through her eyes, viewers live out the greatest joys and most profound struggles from her adolescence to adulthood. Each moment is inextricably shaped by her upbringing—yet she is able to find strength in small interconnected moments with those she loves.
Even as humanity continues to fail and harm each other, Breathe seeks to remind us of the solace we can find in our similarities; we are all human, and we are all connected.

The Racial Terror Project, by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster

The Racial Terror Project is a groundbreaking immersive virtual reality, room-scale installation in which users time travel along the last route of Claude Neal, who was brutally hunted down and lynched by a mob of white men in Florida in 1934, and meet his descendant community today and his ancestors in the era of slavery. The Racial Terror Project tells the story of how our present-day lived experiences of racial violence and discrimination reflect a long, insufficiently-acknowledged history of white racial oppression that dates back to slavery and continues today.

We can’t wait to go along for the journey as these exciting projects push the boundaries of storytelling!

*Chicken & Egg Pictures also supported Tree, the first virtual reality experience in the trilogy that Breathe belongs to.

The Departure (World Documentary Competition)
Directed by Lana Wilson

I Am Evidence* (Spotlight Documentary)
Directed by Trish Adlesic and 2017 Breakthrough Filmmaker Award recipient Geeta Gandbhir

Love the Sinner (Shorts: Viewfinder, World Premiere)
Directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Jessica Devaney

Tree (Virtual Arcade, New York Premiere)
Project Creators: Winslow Turner Porter and Milica Zec

Unrest* (Virtual Arcade, World Premiere)
Project Creators: Arnaud Colinart, Jennifer Brea, Amaury La Burthe
Key Collaborators: Diana Barrett (Fledgling Fund), Lindsey Dryden (Little By Little Films)

For more information and the full roster of films at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, please visit the Tribeca website.

*Chicken & Egg Pictures did not fund the film I Am Evidence, but supports director Geeta Gandbhir as a 2017 Breakthrough Filmmaker Awardee; and did not support the Unrest VR experience, but is a supporter of Unrest the feature-length film by Jennifer Brea.

This weekend marked the beginning of the Year of the Fire Rooster  and things are definitely heating up here at the Nest.

At the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, four Chicken & Egg Pictures-supported documentary films and one VR project made their world premieres and walked away with three awards.

The message of these films couldn’t be more crucial in these times, whether they examine failings of the American justice system, the stigma associated with a misunderstood illness, document one of the most critical moments in modern US racial history, expose the dire implications of a lack of a reproductive healthcare policy, or promote environmentalism through an inventive mix of empathy and technology.

Check out these links to get to know a bit about our Sundance filmmakers and their projects:

WATCH: Sundance’s Meet the Artist for Jennifer Brea, director of Unrest (Sundance winner: U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing)

WATCH: The New York Times Op-Docs short by Ramona Diaz, based on her film Motherland (Sundance winner: World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Commanding Vision)

READ: A beautiful synopsis from the New Yorker‘s Culture Desk of Yance Ford’s Strong Island (Sundance winner: U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling)

READ: The Guardian‘s five-star review of Whose Streets?, directed by Sabaah Folayan and co-directed by Damon Davis

READ: The Indiewire interview with Tree (VR) co-creator, Milica Zec

Congratulations also to Joslyn Barnes, Chicken & Egg Pictures Eggspert who received The Sundance Institute/Amazon Studios Producer Award for Strong Island.

Here’s to amplifying fiery women’s voices in this Year of the Fire Rooster!!

Unrest (Jennifer Brea)

Jennifer, a Harvard Ph.D. student, was signing a check at a restaurant when she found she could not write her own name. Months before her wedding, she became progressively more ill, losing the ability even to sit in a wheelchair. When doctors insisted that her condition was psychosomatic, she picked up her camera to document her own story and the stories of four other patients struggling with the world’s most prevalent orphaned disease.

Strong Island (Yance Ford)

Set in the suburbs of the black middle class, Strong Island seeks to uncover how—in the year of the Rodney King trial and the Los Angeles riots—the murder of the filmmaker’s older brother went unpunished. The film is an unflinching look at homicide, racial injustice, and the corrosive impact of grief over time.

 

Whose Streets? (Sabaah Jordan and Damon Davis)

Motherland (Ramona Diaz)

One of the world’s poorest and most populous countries, the Philippines, struggles with reproductive health policy—both in the legislature where laws are in debate, and in a hospital with the busiest maternity ward on the planet.

Tree (Milica Zec and Winslow Porter)

A virtual experience that transforms you into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and body as the trunk, you experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into its fullest form and witness its fate firsthand.