We are thrilled that for the first time, more than half of feature films in competition (68%) are directed by women, while 41% of all feature films are directed by women.

We are also egg-static that two of the three Nest-supported films on the lineup, Breaking the News and Q are having their world premieres! We hope to see you there.  

It’s Only Life After All

dir. & prod. Alexandria Bombach

prods. Kathlyn Horan, Jess Devaney, Anya Rous

It’s Only Life After All was supported through Alexandria Bombach’s 2019 Chicken & Egg Award and is having its New York premiere in the Spotlight+ section.

Get your tickets here.

Breaking the News

dirs. Chelsea Hernandez, Heather Courtney, Princess A. Hairston

prod. Diane Quon

Breaking the News is a 2022 Critical Issues Fund Grantee having its World Premiere in the Documentary Competition.

Get your tickets here.

Q

dir. & prod. Jude Chehab

Q is a 2021 (Egg)celerator Lab Grantee having its World Premiere in the Documentary Competition.

Get your tickets here.

From the AlumNest

• Kim’s Video – New York Premiere
  dirs. & prods. David Redmon, Ashley Sabin
  prods. Deborah Smith, Dale Smith, Francesco Galavotti, Rebecca Tabasky
  
  
• Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food – World Premiere
  dir. & prod. Stephanie Soechtig
  prods. Ross Girard, Ross Dinerstein, Kristin Lazure, Rebecca Evans
  
  
• Uncharted – World Premiere
  dir. & prod. Beth Aala
  prods. Everywoman Studios, Abby Greensfelder
  
  
• Your Fat Friend – World Premiere
  dir. & prod. Jeanie Finlay
  prod. Suzanne Alizart

Written by Spring Intern Tess Caldwell

At Chicken & Egg Pictures, we are looking forward to the shared experience of film, as New Yorkers head back to the movies again. Viewers within the US can access Tribeca’s virtual programming through $15 online stream tickets.

We are also thrilled to let you know that films slated to premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, but postponed due to COVID-19, will also screen at this year’s edition. Granted films featured in the festival include four (Egg)celerator Lab grantees from 2018 and 2019, one Project: Hatched grantee, one Chicken & Egg Award recipient film, three films from the AlumNest, and one VR project. Learn more about the films below, and get your tickets here. 

Ascension, dir. Jessica Kingdon

Ascension examines the contemporary “Chinese Dream” through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. In cinematically exploring the aspiration that drives today’s People’s Republic of China, the film plunges into universal paradoxes of economic progress.

World Premiere │ Tribeca Documentary Competition │ 2019 (Egg)celerator Lab

Enemies of the State, dir. Sonia Kennebeck

An American family becomes entangled in a bizarre web of secrets and lies when their hacker son is targeted by the U.S. government, making them all Enemies of the State.

US Premiere │ 2018 (Egg)celerator Lab

Pray Away, dir. Kristine Stolakis

Former leaders of the “pray away the gay” movement contend with the aftermath unleashed by their actions, while a survivor seeks healing and acceptance from more than a decade of trauma.

World Premiere │ 2019 (Egg)celerator Lab

Through the Night, dir. Loira Limbal

To make ends meet, Americans are working longer hours across multiple jobs. This modern reality of nonstop work has resulted in an unexpected phenomenon: the flourishing of 24-hour daycare centers. Through the Night is a verité documentary that explores the personal cost of our modern economy through the stories of two working mothers and a child care provider, whose lives intersect at a 24-hour daycare center in New Rochelle, NY.

New York Premiere │ 2018 (Egg)celerator Lab

Landfall, dir. Cecilia Aldarondo

Through shard-like glimpses of everyday life in post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico, Landfall examines a ruined world at the brink of transformation, spinning a cautionary tale for our times.

Project: Hatched 2020

Stateless, dir. Michèle Stephenson

Through the grassroots campaign of electoral hopeful Rosa Iris, director Michèle Stephenson’s new documentary reveals the depths of racial hatred and institutionalized oppression that divide Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

2016 Chicken & Egg Award

Simple as Water, dir. Megan Mylan

A look at war and displacement through the lens of parenthood from Megan Mylan, Academy-Award winning director of Lost Boys of Sudan and Smile Pinki. This feature documentary unfolds as a sequence of cinematic short stories revolving around Syrian families living in Turkey, Greece, the US, Germany, and Syria. Each chapter is an intimate portrait of parents—often mothers alone—as they work to rebuild their children’s lost sense of security and possibility. It is a story that is both urgent and timeless.

World Premiere │ 2018 Grant

VR Experience

The Changing Same: Episode 1, dirs. Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster & Yasmin Elayat

AlumNest Films

The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show, dir. Yoruba Richen (2016 Chicken & Egg Award recipient)
Selected for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival

Women In Blue, dir. Deirdre Fishel (AlumNest for Care)
Selected for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival

Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary, dirs. Julia Reichert (2016 Chicken & Egg Award recipient) and Steve Bognar
Egg-citing news! This world premiere will be Tribeca’s closing night film.

See you at the cinema! Post by 2021 Summer Communications Intern Mariana Sanson. 

See here for showtimes and tickets:

One Child Nation (2017 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee), directed by Nanfu Wang (also a 2018 Chicken & Egg Award recipient) and Jialing Zhang

How much control does a person have over their own life? In China, state control begins before a child is even born.

American Factory, directed by Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert (2016 Chicken & Egg Award recipient)

American Factory tells the story of a Chinese billionaire who opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant in post-industrial Ohio, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

• Friday, April 26 at 8:30 PM — SVA Theater 2
• Saturday, April 27 at 3:45 PM — Regal Cinemas Battery Park
• Tuesday,  April 30 at 6:15 PM — Regal Cinemas Battery Park

Walk, Run, Cha-Cha, directed by Laura Nix (2018 Chicken & Egg Award recipient)*

Paul and Millie Cao lost their youth to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Forty years later, they have become successful professionals in Southern California—and are rediscovering themselves on the dancefloor.

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker based in Chicago. She has reported for the BBC, NPR, AlJazeera, VICE, CNN and was the recipient of a first place Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her directorial debut, The Feeling of Being Watched, was a participant in the 2016 Accelerator Lab and a recipient of The Whickers Chicken & Egg Pictures Award.

In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. With unprecedented access, The Feeling of Being Watched weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community fell under blanket government surveillance.

In 2018, The Feeling of Being Watched had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival, was an official selection at Hot Docs, and received the Audience Award at Camden International Film Festival,  the BlackStar Film Festival, Boston GlobeDocs Film Festival, and the Regent Park Film Festival. The film also won jury awards for Best Documentary Feature and James Lyons Editing Award For Documentary Feature at the Woodstock Film Festival. Assia is a fellow with the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is iterating her most recent work, The Inverse Surveillance Project,  a machine learning fueled sequel to The Feeling of Being Watched.

Post by Morgan Lee Hulquist.

Congratulations to United Skates directors Tina Brown & Dyana Winkler for their 2018 Tribeca Audience Award win! Chicken & Egg Pictures supported Tina and Dyana’s project with our 2016 Diversity Fellows Initiative.

Next, United Skates will be hitting up Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival, so be sure to catch them there!

Read more about the film and its filmmakers in this No Film School interview.

The festival will run from April 5-8. Check out the entire list of films here. Purchase individual screening tickets here.

Dark Money, directed by Kimberly Reed (2018 Discretionary Grant Recipient)

A century ago, corrupt money swamped Montana’s legislature, but Montanans rose up to prohibit corporate campaign contributions. Today, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—which allows unlimited, anonymous money to pour into elections nationwide—Montana is once again fighting to preserve open and honest elections. Following an investigative reporter through a political thriller, Dark Money exposes one of the greatest threats to American democracy.

The Square, directed by Jehane Noujaim

A group of Egyptian revolutionaries battle leaders and regimes, risking their lives to build a new society of conscience.

Kings of Pastry  (2010 Celebration Award Recipient), directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker

On Her Shoulders directed by Alexandria Bombach (2018 SXSW LUNA / Chicken & Egg Pictures Award recipient)

***

Chicken & Egg Pictures also wants to give a special shout-out to the following films by Nest-supported filmmakers whose latest films will also be featured at the 2018 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival!

Capturing the Flag directed by Anne de Mare (director of the Nest-supported film, The Homestretch)
Control Room directed by Jehane Noujaim (director of the Nest-supported film, The Square)
Rafea: Sola Mama directed by Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaeif
Startup.com directed by Chris Hegedus (2010 Celebration Award recipient) and Jehane Noujaim
The Pushouts directed by Katie Galloway (director of the Nest-supported film, The Return)
Inventing Tomorrow directed by Laura Nix (2018 Breakthrough Filmmaker Award Recipient)
This Is Home directed by Alexandra Shiva (Chicken & Egg Pictures Board of Directors)
The Unafraid directed by Heather Courtney and Anayansi Prado (2017 Chicken & Egg Pictures mentee)

Post by 2018 Spring Programs Intern Dinayuri Rodriguez.

Four Chicken & Egg Pictures-supported films are heading to the Tribeca Film Festival (April 18-29) this year. Congratulations to all the filmmakers for their exciting premieres!

Blowin’ Up by Stephanie Wang-Breal
Blowin’ Up looks at sex work, prostitution, and human trafficking through the lens of New York State’s criminal justice system. The film captures the growing pains of our nation’s first human trafficking intervention court in Queens, New York, and how we define trafficking and prostitution from many different perspectives: the criminal justice system, the social welfare system, and, most importantly, the women and girls who are at the center of it all.

The Feeling of Being Watched by Assia Boundaoui
In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where director Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers hundreds of pages of declassified FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counterterrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11––code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.” With unprecedented access, The Feeling of Being Watched weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened to her neighborhood in the 90’s and probes why her community feels like they’re still being watched today. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI’s relationship to her community. The Feeling of Being Watched follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family.

Roll Red Roll by Nancy Schwartzman
Go behind the headlines of notorious high school sexual assault to witness the social media fueled “boys will be boys” culture that let it happen.

In small-town Ohio, at a pre-season football party, a horrible incident took place. What transpired would garner national attention and result in the sentencing of two key offenders. As amateur crime blogger Alex Goddard uncovers disturbing evidence on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, documenting the assault of a teenage girl by members of the beloved high school football team, questions linger around the collusion of teen and adult bystanders. Roll Red Roll explores the complex motivations of both perpetrators and bystanders in this story, to unearth the attitudes at the core of their behavior. The Steubenville story acts as a cautionary tale of what can happen when adults look the other way and deny that rape culture exists. With unprecedented access to police documents, exhibits and evidence, the documentary feature unflinchingly asks: “why didn’t anyone stop it?”

United Skates by Tina Brown and Dyana Winkler
When America’s last standing roller rinks are threatened with closure, a community of thousands battle in a racially charged environment to save an underground subculture–-one that has remained undiscovered by the mainstream for generations, yet has given rise to some of the world’s greatest musical talent.

And a special congratulations to filmmaker Madeleine Sackler for It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It, who was previously supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures for her film, Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus.

The Tribeca Film Festival’s full program will be available March 15.

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 year’s Tribeca Film Festival, running from April 13-24, marks the 15th edition of this annual spring event. Chicken & Egg Pictures is proud to have four grantee films screening in this year’s lineup, along with 6X9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement, the first virtual reality project we have ever supported.

For a full list of films that will screen at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, as well as a complete schedule, visit the Tribeca Film Festival website.

World Documentary Competition
LoveTrue (Alma Ha’rel)
Does our view of love change as we grow older? How do we make decisions about our love lives? Is there such a thing as true love? Are there invisible partners in relationships? Past ghosts of ourselves? The film’s reenactments of significant past experiences and glimpses at possible futures, created with non-actors playing the characters’ older and younger selves, encourage the couples to confront the realities of their hopes and memories, and the effect they have on their love lives.

The Return (Katie Galloway & Kelly Duane de la Vega)
In 2012, California voters passed Proposition 36, which  shortened sentences of the currently incarcerated. Within days, the reintegration of thousands of “lifers”—men & women once expecting to spend their lives in prison—was underway. The Return weaves together multiple narratives of characters on the front lines of this unprecedented shift: prisoners suddenly freed, families turned upside down, attorneys and judges wrestling with an untested law, and reentry providers negotiating unfathomable transitions.

Viewpoints
Solitary (Kristi Jacobson)
Solitary investigates an invisible part of the American justice system: the use of isolation and segregation in US prisons, commonly known as solitary confinement. With unprecedented access inside a prison tackling the issue head on, the film explores this divisive issue through the experiences of those on both sides of the bars. Directed by Chicken & Egg Pictures Breakthrough Filmmaker Award recipient Kristi Jacobson.

Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four (Deborah S. Esquenazi)
Southwest of Salem excavates the nightmarish persecution of Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, and Anna Vasquez — four Latina lesbians wrongfully convicted of allegedly gang raping two little girls. This bizarre case is the first to be adjudicated under momentous new legislation: for the first time in U.S. history, wrongfully convicted innocents can challenge convictions based on debunked scientific evidence. The film also unravels the sinister interplay of mythology, homophobia, and prosecutorial fervor which led to this modern day witch hunt.

Storyscapes
6X9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement (Francesca Panetta & Lindsay Poulton)
Right now, 80,000-100,000 people are in solitary confinement in the US. They spend 22-24 hours a day in their cells, with little to no human contact for days or even decades. The sensory deprivation they endure causes severe psychological damage. These people are invisible to us—and eventually to themselves.

Democrats provides an inside look into the creation of Zimbabwe’s new constitution and the often turbulent road from dictatorship to democracy. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party believes that Zimbabeweans are ready for a democratic system with peaceful un-rigged elections and a constitution written with input from the people. Meanwhile, Robert Mugabe of the ZANU-PF party has been serving as Zimbabwe’s president continuously since 1987.

Nielsson follows representatives from each party, Paul Mangwana from ZANU-PF and Douglas Mwonzora of MDC, as they travel the country holding meetings in cities and villages for citizens to offer their ideas for the country’s constitution. Tensions grow when both parties sit down to draft one constitution they can both agree to sign.