For documentary filmmakers working on the quiet stories. Four grants a year. No strings.
Sloane Connery was a documentary filmmaker. She believed that the small stories were the important ones, and that the loud stories usually took care of themselves. She died in Iceland in 2018, three weeks into a film she was making about a woman who kept a lighthouse on an island of forty people. Her notebook is still on the desk in Vermont. I read it sometimes when I am deciding what to do with the year.
The fund began quietly in 2019. We give four grants a year of twenty five thousand dollars each. The money is given up front and without restriction. We do not ask for receipts. We do not ask for final cut. We do not ask for an executive producer credit. We ask only that the work be made with care, and that we be allowed to watch a rough cut before the world does.
The grants go to filmmakers working on subjects that will not draw a crowd. The last keeper of a small trade. A village that has lost its train. A woman in a hospice who knows more than she is saying. We read every application. We do not know in advance who we are looking for. We usually know when we find them.
W.C.
The Keeper of Dzibilchaltún
A feature-length portrait of Doña Victoria Pech, who has swept the stones at a ruined Maya site in the Yucatán for forty one years. Shooting concludes this September. Working title: The Last Light of the Old Year.
Low Tide in Cork
Four oystermen, one harbour, a season that no longer behaves. Okafor is a cinematographer from Dublin whose first feature documents a generation of Irish shellfishermen learning a new sea.
The Last Cinema in Odate
An essay film about the Ōdate Gekijō, a single-screen theatre opened in 1952 and closing this winter. The film is told in the voices of the people who have been going there most of their lives.
Fourteen Winters
A slow, long-form portrait of an ice cutter in Sitka who has kept the same rhythm of work for fourteen seasons. Shooting takes place between November and March. Kaine lives on the boat with him.
Applications open each quarter. Send a two-page letter describing the film you want to make, one budget page, and three photographs from the place the film is set. No sizzle reels. No decks. We do not need to be impressed, only informed.