The Wife Of
The Wife Of is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
Volia Chajkouskaya is a founder and program director of the Northern Lights Nordic Baltic Film Festival in Belarus. Since 2019 Volia has been working in the Estonian production company Allfilm. She is a voting member of the European Film Academy. Volia is a graduate of Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival’s Emerging Producers 2018. She has a master’s degree in directing and producing a documentary film in the Baltic Film, and Media School (Tallinn, Estonia).
Volia launched Volia Films (Estonia / Belarus) production company in 2016. Volia Films produced the feature length documentary The Road Movie (dir. Dmitrii Kalashnikov) in 2016, had its world premiere at IDFA First Appearance Competition, was screened at more than 80 festivals, and in 2018 was distributed in the US. Volia produced the documentary My Granny From Mars (dir. Alexandr Mihalkovich) 2018, which was world premiered at Jihlava IDFF. She co-produced Pure art (dir. Maksim Shved) 2019, which premiered at the Krakow Film Festival. Currently Volia has several films on different production stages.
Common Language, Volia’s debut short film as a director, was selected for Jihlava IDFF 2020, Cleveland IFF 2021, and Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2021. My idea of myself is Volia’s second short film as a director. The Wife Of is Volia’s feature length directorial debut film.
ABOUT THE PRODUCERS
Ivo Felt is a producer, sound designer, and co-founder of Estonian production company Allfilm. Ivo’s productions include Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines, nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, as well as Klaus Härö’s The Fencer, nominated for a Golden Globe. Ivo is also teaching at the Baltic Film, and Media School, and the Estonian Art Academy.
Ivo was a line producer for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, co-producer of Carl Olsson’s Meanwhile on Earth, producer of Tanel Toom’s Truth and Justice, among others.
Christian Popp is a former commissioning editor at ARTE. He commissioned more than 30 documentaries, numerous themed evenings, and live broadcasting shows. He became a producer in 2005 for interscience film, and DOCDAYS Productions, before confounding YUZU Productions. His productions have premiered at Sundance, IDFA, and Cannes Film Festival.
His work as producer includes Russia vs. Russia, Time Thieves, Becoming Cary Grant, among others.
Marius Markevicius is an award-winning filmmaker and President of Sorrento Productions, based in Los Angeles. Marius directed and produced Ashes in the Snow, the film adaptation of The New York Times best-selling novel Between Shades of Gray. He directed the documentary feature film The Other Dream Team, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2012. Marius co-produced Drake Doremu’s Like-Crazy.
Our Daughters
SYNOPSIS
A much-anticipated visit by their birth mother unravels questions around adoption and identity for eight-year-old twins and their South Asian parents, who adopted them as infants. From rural New Mexico to affluent suburban Pennsylvania, Our Daughters weaves intimate vérité footage with home movies to tell an unprecedented coming-of-age story of two white daughters and their immigrant household, as they navigate identity, past traumas, and the future of their unique American family.
Our Daughters is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Chithra Jeyaram is a filmmaker based in New York. She directs, produces, and edits documentaries and films about identity, relationships, race, art, and health. Her first exposure to filmmaking began with a failed attempt to fund a film in India. Deeply affected by that experience, she quit a decade-long career as a Physical Therapist and got an MFA in film production from The University of Texas at Austin. Her short film Mijo, aired on KLRU TV and played in 50 film festivals globally. She directed Foreign Puzzle, distributed by New Day Films, a member-owned distribution cooperative. Currently, she is making Our Daughters, a feature documentary that examines open adoption in America through an immigrant lens. In addition to Chicken & Egg pictures, Our Daughters is supported by Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist Grant, Jerome Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, New York State Council for the Arts, Gotham Documentary Lab & Project Market (formerly the Project Forum), Sheffield Meet Market, DOC NYC, and BFI Production Finance Market.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
Jonna McKone is a filmmaker, producer, and artist based in Baltimore, MD. She works with documentary, narrative, archives, and abstraction to explore connections between landscapes, the body, and memory. She produced All Light, Everywhere (directed by Theo Anthony) which premiered in Competition at Sundance Film Festival in 2021, where it won a U.S. Special Jury Award. Before working in the film she was an award-winning radio producer for places like the WYPR, BCC, NPR, and WNYC. Her work as an artist and documentarian has received support from Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s Rubys Artist Grant, Skidmore’s Storytellers’ Institute, Baker Artist Awards, the Puffin Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, the Center for Documentary Studies, and Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work as a producer has received support from Sandbox Films, Cinereach, Rooftop Films, and Chicken & Egg Pictures.
Olimpia
SYNOPSIS
After being exposed on the internet at 18 years old, Olimpia decided to find justice by her own hand. As sexual virtual violence wasn’t considered a crime in Mexico, she accepted and embraced her story and turned it into a battle flag. In 2019, she played a fundamental role in the enactment of a groundbreaking law, named after her, to protect women against cyberviolence.
She’s now a public character that reappropriated her narrative, but remains with an open wound and a lingering gaze. The border between her public and private life is blurred. She’s no longer who she was forced to be, but who she decided to become. Will that be enough?
Olimpia is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Indira Cato studied Dramatic Literature and Drama at UNAM. In 2014, she produced Llévate mis amores (All of Me), directed by Arturo González Villaseñor. From 2017 to 2019 she produced #Mickey, directed by Betzabé García, with the support of the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg’s (Egg)celerator Lab, and IMCINE. She is currently co-producing Maize Daughters, directed by Alfonso Gastiaburo (with the support of INCAA and IMCINE). Olimpia is her first film as a director. She also works as a production professor.
Matryoshka
SYNOPSIS
Patricia Mora waited her whole life to follow her dreams, and now at 70 years old, she has become one of the most relevant feminist left-wing politician in Costa Rica. This film accompanies the profound transformations she experiences in order to continue building her life. Exploring a universe of mournings, questions, and contradictions, Matryoshka is an intimate portrait of a mother through her daughter’s eyes.
Matryoshka is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Maricarmen Merino Mora is a Costa Rican filmmaker. Her work explores the thin line between the personal and the political, trying to understand, and question the most intimate narratives that shape our lives. She studied Film Direction at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico. Her hybrid short film Bella was part of the Official Selection of the Guadalajara Film Festival, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography EnergaCAMERIMAGE, and was awarded as Best Director at the International Short Film Festival in Mexico. Her debut documentary feature film ¿Dónde estás? premiered at the Guadalajara Film Festival in 2018. She is working on her second documentary feature Matryoshka.
ABOUT THE PRODUCERS
Karla Bukantz was Head of Production at Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico and Deputy Director of Production of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE). She is the producer of Sandra Luz López Barroso’s debut documentary film The One Amongst the Shadows, awarded the Silver Puma for Best Film at FICUNAM International Cinema Festival 2021.
Paulina Villegas is a producer and legal advisor with an MA in International Film Business from the London Film School. As a firm believer that media can change our world perception, she is currently developing several films that focus on female narratives, and promote on-screen representation.
Songs from the Hole
SYNOPSIS
An incarcerated musician struggles for healing and peace as he comes of age in this documentary-musical odyssey composed behind bars.
Songs from the Hole is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
Contessa Gayles is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and Emmy® nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movements, healing, liberation, and the radical imagination. Contessa previously directed, produced, DP’ed, and edited original series and documentaries for CNN (The Feminist on Cellblock Y). Her work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, SFFILM, Artemis Rising Foundation, and others. She is a 2021 Film Independent Amplifier fellow, a 2021 BAVC MediaMaker fellow, and a 2022 Firelight Media Documentary Lab fellow.
Joonam
SYNOPSIS
Joonam follows filmmaker Sierra Urich, as she embarks on an odyssey-esque summer vacation with her mother Mitra, and grandmother Behjat, hoping to learn about their lives in Iran. Between road trips to the beach, and fireside storytelling, the three women begin to retrace the past. But quickly, the long days spent together prove to be much more challenging than Sierra expected, and it seems that beneath their comical family antics something bigger is brewing.
Joonam is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Sierra Urich is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, whose work blends animation, sculpture, video art, and narrative & nonfiction filmmaking. In 2013 she received her BFA in Illustration and Film/Animation/Video from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), with a liberal arts focus in creative writing at Brown University. She was awarded the Emerging Artist Scholarship as an artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts (2017), Sundance Nonfiction Directors Fellowship (2018), Creative Capital finalist (2020 & 2021), Firelight Doc Lab Fellowship (2021), and Points North Fellow 2018 where her first feature film, Joonam, was awarded the winning project by a panel of industry representatives. To date, Joonam (in production) has received support from Sundance Institute, HBO Documentary Films, Cinereach, Catapult Film Fund, Tribeca Institute, Independent Filmmaker Project, LEF Foundation, Firelight Media, Points North Institute, CNN Films, Field of Vision, and Chicken & Egg Pictures.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
Keith Wilson is a producer, director and artist based in Athens, Georgia whose films have screened at Sundance, the Berlinale, Hot Docs, the US National Gallery of Art, documenta14, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is currently a Creative Producing Fellow with the Sundance Institute for feature-length I Didn’t See You There, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Award. His recent short film The Tree screened at MoMA’s 2019 Doc Fortnight program, DOC NYC, and was exhibited as a storefront installation at Artist Television Access in San Francisco. For his work-in-progress live documentary performance, Untitled Frank Moore Project, he was a BAVC National Mediamaker Fellow and a Points North Institute Fellow. He was the Producer, Director of Photography, and Editor of Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature directed by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that premiered at documenta14 in Kassel, Germany. He was Director of Photography and Producer for INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR., which premiered at Sundance and was released theatrically by Strand Releasing. Keith is a member-owner of New Day Films, received his Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from The University of Texas at Austin, and grew up on a cul-de-sac in suburban Atlanta.
Here, the Silence is Heard
SYNOPSIS
Gabriela returns to the port city of Valparaíso in Chile, which her family had to abandon in the ‘70s when exiled to Germany and then Spain. Aiming to break a spell of permanent transit, she moves into the run-down family home. While she renovates it, her grandfather’s sudden hospitalization awakes her grandmother’s traumatic memories, as her life partner–a survivor of a murderous dictatorship–becomes absent once again in a still revolted country, whose violence infiltrates at night through the house’s windows.
Here, the Silence is Heard is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
Gabriela Pena is a Chilean-Spanish documentary filmmaker. She studied Audiovisual Communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain), and is based in Valparaíso (Chile), where she was born and co-founded Grieta Cine. In 2021Gabriela directed her first documentary feature Zoila (International Competition at International Documentary Film Festival of Buenos Aires) and is currently filming her second documentary feature, Here, the Silence is Heard, which received the Open City Documentary Festival’s Assembly Lab development fund, and participates in Chicken and Egg Pictures’ (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE CO-DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
Picho Garcia is a Chilean filmmaker and producer. He studied Cinema at Valparaiso University. After producing independent short films and working several years at Viña del Mar International Film Festival, the second oldest Latin American film festival, he co-founded Grieta Cine. His first documentary feature as producer (Zoila), directed by Gabriela Pena, premiered in 2021. Picho currently co-directs Here, the Silence is Heard, Gabriela’s second documentary feature. As a director he is working on Familia, his first short film–a desktop documentary supported by the Chilean Audiovisual Fund.
7 Beats Per Minute
SYNOPSIS
7 Beats Per Minute takes the audience into the life and underwater world of Jessea Lu, the first Chinese female freediving champion. With intimate cinéma vérité camerawork, and Director Yuqi Kang’s, unique personal voice, we travel with Jessea on her unwavering journey to become a world champion.
An accomplished pharmaceutical advisor by day and top freediver during her free time, Jessea unflinchingly commits herself to everything she does. In 2018, Jessea’s life was nearly cut short when she blacked out 20 meters underwater during her last world-record attempt: a dive of 93 meters. She was lifeless for four minutes.
After coming face-to-face with death, instead of quitting, Jessea decides to continue her training–preparing and sharpening her skills with the rigor of the world’s most preeminent competitors. In 2022, we follow Jessea’s return to the world freediving stage as she emerges with a bigger, more dangerous goal: reaching 100 meters depth in the same contest she nearly died in 2018. 7 Beats Per Minute is more than a straightforward extreme sports film, it tells a complex, nuanced, immersive tale of an extreme sport as experienced by the athlete; it is a film that takes viewers into the psyche of a freediver–a young woman who aims for unparalleled achievement as bold, independent professionals in worlds vastly different than where she came from.
7 Beats Per Minute is a participant of the 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Yuqi Kang was born in Inner Mongolia, China. She studied filmmaking in the Social Documentary Film Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in Social Documentary Film. Her feature debut A Little Wisdom premiered at Busan International Film Festival and SXSW. It was awarded the Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs, Grand Jury Award at DOC NYC, and she was named one of the five breakthrough directors by the Directors Guild of Canada. Yuqi is also an alumnus of TIFF Talent Lab, Tribeca Institute, Hot Docs, RIDM Talent Lab, and the Canadian Academy Directors Program for Women. In 2019 she was named in DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list.
ABOUT THE PRODUCERS
For more than twenty-five years, Ina Fichman–Intuitive Pictures, has been producing award-winning documentary and fiction films, and interactive projects. Many of her creative documentaries have been released in theaters in Canada and abroad, and have played at festivals including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Montreal International Documentary Festival Festival, CPH:DOX, Venice International Film Festival, SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival, TIFF, and others. Among her award-winning productions are Amer Shomali’s The Wanted 18, Monsoon (Canada’s Top 10) and Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. Her recent productions include Stray, The Gig is Up, Once Upon a Sea, Blue Box, The Oslo Diaries, Inside Lehman Brothers, Gift and Laila at the Bridge. In 2018, Ina was the recipient of the Don Haig Award from Hot Docs, which recognizes the work of an outstanding Canadian independent producer.
Anita Lee is Executive Producer of the National Film Board of Canada’s Ontario Studio. She is a multi-award-winning producer and founder of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Lee is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From 2005 to the present, Lee has produced some of the most critically acclaimed works in recent NFB history, including Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, named Best Documentary Feature by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, the Canadian Screen Awards, as well as Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association. Lee also established the studio’s Creative Non-Fiction Immersive Lab which collaborated with the CFC Media Lab and Ford Foundation on the Open Immersion VR residency Lab and the NFB/NT Creative Doc VR Lab with National Theatre (UK), in 2016.
Untitled Project
SYNOPSIS
Undisclosed project.
Untitled Project is a 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab Finalist.
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS & PRODUCERS
Shirley Abraham is a Cannes and World Press Photo award-winning Indian documentary filmmaker. She has directed, produced, and edited The Cinema Travellers (Official Selection, Cannes 2016), Searching for Saraswati (The New York Times, 2018), The Hour of Lynching (The Guardian, 2019), and The Great Abandonment (The Guardian, upcoming), along with Amit Madheshiya. Her work has won numerous international honors and fellowships including the President’s Medal in India. Shirley is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Amit Madheshiya is a Cannes and World Press Photo award-winning Indian documentary filmmaker. He has directed, filmed and edited The Cinema Travellers (Official Selection, Cannes 2016), Searching for Saraswati (The New York Times, 2018), The Hour of Lynching (The Guardian, 2019), and The Hour of Lynching (The Guardian, upcoming), along with Shirley Abraham. His work has won numerous international honors and fellowships including the President’s Medal in India. Amit is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
When They Were Here
SYNOPSIS
When They Were Here is a documentary about the missing and murdered indigenous women, and girls crisis within the Blackfeet Reservation in the state of Montana. The film is told through the memories and lives of those that are left behind by the crisis: families. Three stories intersect through time, place, and memory–creating a shared experience of the crisis that examines the legacy of violence of the place they call home..
When They Were Here is a 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab Finalist.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Ivy MacDonald is an Emmy® Award winning Blackfeet filmmaker based in Montana. As an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe, most of her work has focused on her community. The most recent project she produced, Blackfeet Boxing: Not Invisible, won an Emmy® at the 2021 Sports Emmy® Awards. Her first feature length directorial project When They Were Here is in production and has received support from ITVS, Firelight Media, and Chicken & Egg Pictures.
ABOUT THE CO-DIRECTOR
Ivan MacDonald is an Emmy® Award winning Blackfeet filmmaker based in Montana. As an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe, most of his work has focused on his community. The most recent project he produced, Blackfeet Boxing: Not Invisible, won an Emmy® at the 2021 Sports Emmy® Awards. His first feature length directorial project When They Were Here is in production and has received support from ITVS, Firelight Media, and Chicken & Egg Pictures.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
Jessica Jane Hart is a Montana native who studied photography at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming. After graduating in 2006, she moved to Munich, Germany to work as a freelance assistant to photographers Elias Hassos, Anja Frers, and Matthias Ziegler. In 2009, she returned to the US and has been working as a freelance photographer in Montana, New York, and California. In 2013, she began to work on her first documentary film project, Makoshika, which was completed in 2015.