2018 Summer Documentary Lab Fellow Madsen Minax awarded Sarah Jacobson Film Grant

Congratulations to Madsen Minax, who was awarded the 2018 Sarah Jacobson Film Grant from the Free History Project to work on the film North by Current. This annual film grant is intended to honor the spirit and legacy of Sarah Jacobson.

After a long absence, Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Through first-person cinema vérité and genre-bending storytelling, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

Madsen Minax is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects span documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, collective and collaborative practices, and media installation. Madsen’s projects draw on his history of participation in justice oriented communities, and aim to investigate and honor the entanglements of human connectivity and the nature of transformation.