Machtat World Premiere + Four Nest-supported Films at Visions du Réel
Chicken & Egg Pictures is proud to see five Nest-supported films in the lineup for Visions Du Réel 2023. The festival will take place between Friday, April 21 to Sunday, April 30 in Nyon, Switzerland.
We are sending special congratulations to the 2020 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee Machtat on their World Premiere!
Against the Tide
dir. Sarvnik Kaur
prods. Koval Bhatia, Quentin Laurent
Against the Tide is a 2021 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee participating in the Grand Angle Section.
Get your tickets here.
Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes From the Labudović Reels
dir. & prod. Mila Turajlić
prod. Carine Chichkowsky
Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes From the Labudović Reels will be participating in the Grand Angle Section and was supported through Mila Turajlić’s 2020 Chicken & Egg Award.
Get your tickets here.
Eat Bitter
dir. Ningyi Sun, Pascale Appora-Gnekindy
prod. Mathieu Faure
Eat Bitter is a 2022 (Egg)celerator Lab finalist participating in the Grand Angle Section.
Get your tickets here.
El eco / The Echo
dir. & prod. Tatiana Huezo
prod. Dalia Reyes
El eco / The Echo will be participating in the Grand Angle Section and was supported through Tatiana Huezo’s 2021 Chicken & Egg Award.
Get your tickets here.
Machtat
dir. Sonia Ben Slama
prods. Tania El Khoury, Cécile Lestrade, Elise Hug
Machtat is a 2020 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee having its World Premiere in the International Feature Film Competition.
Get your tickets here.
Vdr-Rough Cut Lab & VdR-Pitching Session
Our Daughters
dir. & prod. Chithra Jeyaram
2022 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee Our Daughters will be participating in the VdR rough cut lab.
Florence from Ohio
dir. Stephanie Wang Breal
prods. Mynette Louie, Carrie Weprin
Florence from Ohio was supported through Stephanie Wang Breal’s 2019 Chicken & Egg Award and it is participating in the VdR-Pitching Session.
Meet our Team at Visions Du Réel
Representing Chicken & Egg Pictures, our Associate Director of Program Sabine Fayoux Cantillo will be in attendance at Visions Du Reel. While in Nyon, she’ll be participating in VdR-Pitching, attending VdR-Work in Progress, and taking 1-1 meetings with filmmakers.
Written by Spring Intern Tess Caldwell
Brett Story and Stephanie Wang-Breal selected for Original Voices Fellowship!
At Chicken & Egg Pictures we are sending massive congratulations to Chicken & Egg Award recipients Brett Story and Stephanie Wang-Breal on being selected for an NBCU Academy Original Voices Fellowship. The fellowship is directed towards documentarians who identify as–or showcase stories highlighting social issues affecting–women, LGBTQ+, communities of color and people with disabilities.
The selected fellows will receive a $60,000 grant and a one-year artist development fellowship designed to help each filmmaker with the completion of their films; access to archival research and production resources as well as NBC News Studios executives and journalists; attend the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, Continents of Drifting Clouds, programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka; and will also participate in Collective Lens: An Impact Roadmap, a robust impact strategy workshop, led by Peace is Loud, to equip filmmakers with the tools to run their own impact campaigns, advancing transformative peace and social justice through storytelling.
Congratulations! 🥳
2022 Chicken & Egg Award recipient Brett Story
Union
dirs. Brett Story and Stephen Maing
prods. Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone,
From the perspective of a single Amazon fulfillment center, this documentary is an intimate portrait of current and former Amazon workers taking on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.
2019 Chicken & Egg Award recipient Stephanie Wang-Breal
Florence From Ohio
dir. Stephanie Wang-Breal
prod. Carrie Weprin & Mynette Louie
Florence from Ohio is a real-life, genre-twisting film about Florence Wang and her second-generation daughter, Stephanie Wang-Breal. Told through the lens of Florence’s St. John Knit power suits and 1980s local TV cooking show, mother and daughter collectively reimagine and grapple with their generational ideas of motherhood, feminism, racism, and assimilation.
Check out the full list of recipients with this link.
Stephanie Wang-Breal: Dozen Days of Filmmakers — Day 5
Chicken & Egg Pictures is celebrating the holiday season by featuring a dozen Nest-supported women and gender non-conforming filmmakers. For more Dozen Days of Filmmakers, see here.
A first-generation Chinese American from Youngstown, Ohio, Stephanie Wang-Breal uses film as a tool to subvert the narrative. She is an award-winning filmmaker, commercial director and co-founder of the independent production company, Once in a Blue Films. Wang-Breal has directed three feature length films: Tough Love (2014) and the Nest-supported Wo Ai Ni Mommy (2010) and Blowin’ Up (2018).
She has also directed commercials and short form content with talents and brands such as Tan Dun, Planned Parenthood, Minwax, ESPN, Tiffany & Co, Verifone, and Apple. Wang-Breal’s independent work has been supported and recognized by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, and featured at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Wang-Breal was also awarded a 2019 Chicken & Egg Award, and she resides in Brooklyn, New York with her son and daughter.
Nest-supported Films on POV’s 32nd Season
Egg-cellent news from POV, television’s longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction films, as they announced yesterday the slate for their Season 32 broadcast. Nine out of POV’s sixteen feature films this season are helmed by women directors, and six of those films are Nest-supported projects or by Nest-supported directors.
At Chicken & Egg Pictures, we are so proud to support women filmmakers whose voices are changing the world, one television broadcast at a time. Make sure to set your DVR or stream on pov.org or amdoc.org in order to catch these powerful documentaries:
Roll Red Roll, directed by Nancy Schwartzman will be the opening film for the new season, broadcasting June 17 on all PBS stations and across its platforms and pov.org and amdoc.org.
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, unearthing 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?”
On Her Shoulders, directed by 2019 Chicken & Egg Award recipient Alexandria Bombach (2018 SXSW LUNA/Chicken & Egg Pictures Award recipient) will broadcast July 22.
This empowering documentary presents 23-year-old Nadia Murad, a Yazidi genocide survivor determined to tell the world her story. Determined advocate and reluctant celebrity, she becomes the voice of her people and their best hope to spur the world to action.
Inventing Tomorrow, directed by 2018 Chicken & Egg Award recipient Laura Nix will broadcast on July 29.
Meet passionate teenage innovators from around the globe who are creating cutting edge solutions to confront the world’s environmental threats – found right in their own backyards – while navigating the doubts and insecurities that mark adolescence. Take a journey with these inspiring teens as they prepare their projects for the largest convening of high school scientists in the world, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).
Grit, directed by Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander, will broadcast on September 9.
Grit is the story of a huge, toxic mudflow in Indonesia widely believed to be caused by shoddy drilling practices. The mud volcano has been erupting violently for the past eight years, burying 17 villages and permanently displacing 60,000 people. Grit follows ordinary Indonesians seeking justice for this disaster during a national election in which one presidential candidate has promised restitution—and the other has not.
The Feeling of Being Watched, directed by Assia Boundaoui (2016 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee) will broadcast on October 14.
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.
Blowin’ Up, directed by 2019 Chicken & Egg Award recipient Stephanie Wang-Breal will broadcast on October 21.
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.
Changing Same, directed by Impact & Innovation Initiative grantees Michèle Stephenson (also a 2016 Chicken & Egg Award recipient) and Joe Brewster, is on the second season of POV’s Shorts program, following On Her Shoulders.
Chicken & Egg Pictures is supporting the immersive, room-scale virtual reality experience based on the short film, Changing Same: The Untitled Racial Justice Project.
Check your local listings for broadcast times and more information.
The Nest at the 2019 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
The 16th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival kicked off last Friday, February 15 and will continue to Sunday, February 24 in Missoula, Montana. The festival hosts over 200 visiting artists, presents an average of 150 nonfiction films, and we are egg-static to report that seven Chicken & Egg Pictures-supported films were included in the line-up.
Councilwoman, directed by Margo Guernsey
World Premiere: Friday, February 22 at 5:00 pm — Elks Lodge
A hotel housekeeper, from the Dominican Republic, has won a City Council seat in Providence, Rhode Island. Carmen balances cleaning hotel rooms with navigating a political establishment that does not easily acquiesce to the needs of working people. She falls in love and gets married, but the relationship falls apart. That doesn’t stop her from gaining confidence in her new political role. She manages complicated neighborhood dynamics, and takes on issues of tax equity and fair wages. Despite her leadership, she faces a tight re-election campaign when her contenders suggest a more traditional politician would do a better job.
Blowin’ Up, directed by Stephanie Wang-Breal
Northwest Premiere: Thursday, Feb. 21 at 8:45pm — MCT Center for the Performing
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.
Grit, directed by Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander
Montana Premiere: Thursday, February 21 at 9:15 pm — Elks Lodge
Grit is the story of a huge, toxic mudflow in Indonesia widely believed to be caused by shoddy drilling practices. The mud volcano has been erupting violently for the past eight years, burying 17 villages and permanently displacing 60,000 people. Grit follows ordinary Indonesians seeking justice for this disaster during a national election where one presidential candidate has promised restitution — and the other has not.
Roll Red Roll, directed by Nancy Schwartzman
Montana Premiere: Sunday, February 17 at 1:30pm
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. Roll Red Rolle 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?”
A Thousand Girls Like Me, directed by
Montana Premiere: Sunday, Feb. 24 at 8:45 pm — Elks Lodge
When a 23-year-old Afghan woman, Khatera, confronts the will of her family and the traditions of her country to seek justice for years of sexual abuse from her father, she sheds light on the faulty Afghan judicial system and the women it rarely protects.
Tre Maison Dasan, directed by Denali Tiller
Montana Premiere: Wednesday, Feb. 20 at 6:15pm — Elks Lodge
Tre Maison Dasan is a story that explores parental incarceration through the eyes of three boys—Tre, Maison, and Dasan. Following their interweaving trajectories through boyhood marked by the criminal justice system, and told directly through the child’s perspective, the film unveils the challenges of growing up and what it means to become a man in America.
Warrior Women, directed by
The women of the American Indian Movement fight from a vulnerable place only matriarchs can understand—it is a battle for their children and the culture they hope to preserve for them. Warrior Women chronicles the struggle of Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcy Gilbert, a Lakota mother and daughter whose fight for indigenous rights started in the 1970s and continues today at Standing Rock.