The Diverse Filmmakers Alliance (DFA) will present two programs on Thursday, July 7 and Friday, July 8 at UnionDocs. DFA is a group of documentary, narrative, experimental, and transmedia filmmakers from diverse backgrounds who meet weekly to workshop their media projects.  The alliance’s goal is to provide and receive feedback designed to make their media projects more fundable, more watchable, more entertaining, more educational and ready to meet their audience.  The group meets once a week at the Women Make Movies office in Chelsea. The programs will feature work from their members along with former UnionDocs CoLab fellow Arisleyda Dilone and former UnDo programming intern, Melissa Saucedo.

Friday, July 8

The Way You Love by Lydia Darly (10 min)

The Way You Love is a short film based on the filmmaker’s personal experience, and the many conversations around love with women, many of which were exchanged in beauty parlors and hair salons in Garges-les gonesse near Paris where she lived. The Way You Love is about unconditional love and forgiveness of the past in order to be free.

72 Hours : a Brooklyn Love Story? by Raafi Rivero

Caesar Winslow, 18, is the charismatic leader of his crew. Unlike his friends, he has a chance to leave Brooklyn and attend a prestigious university. But he’s got big problems. His girlfriend dumped him, and guys in the neighborhood are already lining up to take his crown. Torn by his desire to experience a new life and a fear of leaving the only world he’s ever known, Caesar has 72 hours to steel himself.

Before David by Melissa Saucedo (20 min)

A short documentary about PRE-partum depression, its symptoms, and the difficulties it poses when a woman is going through the extreme physical and emotional changes of pregnancy.

black enuf* (segment) by Carrie Hawks (4 min)

black enuf* explores the expanding black identity. This animated documentary takes a playful approach to heavier questions of race, difference, and self-acceptance.

Gaysians by Vicky Du (13 min)

Five queer and trans Asian-Americans from New York City and explore their relationships with their family and culture in this patchwork documentary.

The Liberation of Helène Aylon by Kelly Spivey (25 min)

This intimate film portrait explores how a woman raised in an Orthodox, working class community became a radical feminist conceptual artist, commandeering a monumental cross-country trip to “rescue” nuclear contaminated earth. Helène Aylon will charm and mystify you with her endlessly hopeful view of humanity, art and her faith.

Jessy’s House of Styles by Walis Johnson (4 min)

An ethnographic film on a day in the life of an african American barber located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn that is about to go out of business because of rising rent.

Bios

Lydia Darly was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris (France) called ” banlieues”. She is originally from Guadeloupe. She was first discovered as an actress at age 17 when she was invited to audition for Mathieu Kassovitz film Cafe au Lait thus began her journey and passion for theater and films. She was part of several experimental and avant-garde theater companies in Paris as a teenager, before her journey as aspiring actress and model took her to Rome, where she continued her passion for acting. She was featured in The Exorcist: The Beginning and acted in several TV series in Rome. Lydia love of American Cinema and desire to develop and perfect her craft took her to New York City. She studied at the Lee Strasberg,TVI actors studio, and with acting coach and director Jordan Bayne fostering a working/Mentor relationship with her. Lydia was Jordan’s assistant on the film,The Sea Is All I Know, featuring Academy Award Winner, Melissa Leo. Lydia is the writer, producer and lead Actress of the short Film SCRATCH. For her performance she won the Best Actress Award in 2012  and Best Director Award for The Way You Love in 2014 at the CinemAvennire Film Festival in Rome Italy.

Raafi Rivero has directed numerous short films, music videos, and advertisements. His directing credits include a suite of promos for HBO?s True Blood, content for Microsoft, Sony, The Rockefeller Foundation, and an Art Directors Club award-winning viral campaign for the Maryland Lottery. His transmedia film pitch Heart of the City was the inaugural winner of London’s Power to the Pixel competition and part of IFP?s No Borders film market the following year. Their Eyes Were Watching Gummy Bears (2010) played 22 film festivals, winning honors in multiple cities. 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story?, Raafi’s first feature film, is currently in postproduction. Raafi holds an MFA from Howard University and a BA from Brown University. His writing about new media has appeared in The New York Times.

Melissa Saucedo is documentary filmmaker from Northeast Mexico. She moved to New York City with The Fulbright Scholarship in 2011. Her documentary, The Coalmen, about the harsh working conditions of coal miners in Mexico, was awarded at Monterrey International Film Festival in 2010. In NYC, she worked for brief periods at the production company Quit Pictures, POV – television’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films, and UnionDocs. As an independent filmmaker she focuses on issues of health, gender, education, and immigration. She holds a MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, CUNY, and a MS in Communications and BA in Marketing from the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico.

Carrie Hawks is a filmmaker, artist, and designer. Her work explores race, gender, sexuality and constructed identities. She is a New York based artist. She works in a variety of mediums including paintings, drawings, dolls, and film. Her film “Delilah” won best experimental film at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival in 2012. She holds a BA in Art History and Printmaking from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University. She has exhibited in New York, Atlanta, Toronto, Berlin, and Tokyo. She graduated from Barnard College, studying Art History and Printmaking. Her second degree is in Graphic Design from Georgia State University. Her current project is black enuf*  The Jerome Foundation awarded her a grant in 2014 for this film.

Vicky Du is a Taiwanese-American documentary filmmaker based in New York City. Her short film Gaysians was selected for NewFest and Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. She is currently developing a non-fiction feature on the birth tourism experiences of single Chinese women in the US. Her directing and editing work has been featured on The History Channel, The New Yorker and National Geographic. Vicky has a BA in Biological Anthropology from Columbia University, and in a past life, she studied wild monkeys in Kenya and the Caribbean. She is a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers’ Collective and Diverse Filmmakers’ Alliance.

Kelly Spivey has been making films since 1998. Her films have explored themes of class, gender, women’s roles and more recently, anxiety, especially in relationship to our increasingly frenetic urban lifestyles, and information overload capabilities. Her work has screened nationally and internationally and has won various awards. Several of her film projects have received support from the Queens Council on the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, and she was a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellow in 2005. She works in New York City in audio and video production and post-production under the name KinoPixel and is an Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College where she earned her M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts in 2014.

Walis Johnson is an experimental filmmaker, artist, educator, avid walker and ceramic potter whose work documents the experience of the urban landscape through ethnographic film, oral history, and artist walking practice.  She is interested in the intersection of documentary film and performance. Her latest work, The Red Line Archive, a mobile public art project focused on the history of the 1938 Red line Map in Brooklyn and its impact on neighborhoods of Clinton Hill/Fort Greene, Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, areas of cultural and historical importance in black Brooklyn. The Archive is a personal history that exposes critical links among housing and racial discrimination, urban gentrification, economic displacement and cultural/historical erasure. Walis has an MFA from Hunter College, in Interactive Media and Documentary film and has taught at Parsons School of Design. She has presented her work at the Animart Conference on artist walking practices in Delphi, Greece in 2016 and at the Brooklyn Museum’s Community Forum Anti-gentrification and Displacement Forum. A new iteration of  archive representing the history of redlining in Loisaida and Stuyvesant Town neighborhoods will appear this fall in the Art in Odd Places Festival along 14th Street in NYC.