Gotham Alumni On Screen: January 2024
by The Gotham Staff on January 3, 2024 in Alumni on Screen
Welcome to Alumni on Screen, January 2024 edition! To champion and signal boost our Gotham-supported projects, at the top of each month we’ll have a rundown of alumni making their way into the world on screens both big and small.
JANUARY 1
Sundance Favorites Collection
The Criterion Channel
For four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been at the heart of American independent cinema, providing a vital launching pad for up-and-coming filmmakers wholly committed to their singular artistic vision. From acclaimed features by maverick directors like the Coen brothers (Blood Simple), Wendell B. Harris Jr. (Chameleon Street), Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation), and Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy) to crossover hits like The Blair Witch Project and touchstone documentaries such as Streetwise, Paris is Burning, and Hoop Dreams, this selection of highlights from across the festival’s history celebrates its ongoing dedication to bold, personal storytelling from outside the mainstream.
Gotham Alums: screening as part of this series on The Criterion Channel are alumni films such as Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s Chameleon Street (Project Market 1989), Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (Project Market 1985), Al Reinert’s For All Mankind (Project Market 1986 & 1988), Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (Project Market 2003), Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (Project Market 1989), Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (Project Market 1987 & 1990), Richard Linklater’s Slacker (Project Market 1989), Martin Bell’s Streetwise (Project Market 1984), William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (Project Market 1991), Jan Oxenberg’s Thank You and Good Night (Project Market 1983, 1984, 1986), and Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (Project Market 1986).
JANUARY 1
Lingua Franca
The Criterion Channel
This poignant human drama from acclaimed writer-director-star Isabel Sandoval follows Olivia (Sandoval), an undocumented Filipina trans woman, after she has secured a job as a live-in caregiver for Olga (Lynn Cohen), an elderly Russian woman in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood. Olivia’s main priority is to secure a green card to stay in America. But when she unexpectedly becomes romantically involved with Olga’s adult grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), issues around identity, civil rights, and immigration threaten her very existence.
Directed by Isabel Sandoval and produced by Jerome Kerkman, Darlene Catly Malimas, Isabel Sandoval, Jhett Tolentino, and Carlo Velayo.
Gotham Alum: Lingua Franca is an alumnus of the 2016 Project Market.
JANUARY 1
Farewell Amor
The Criterion Channel
In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil war in Angola, a New York taxi driver (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is reunited with his now devoutly religious wife (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter (Jayme Lawson) when they are finally able to follow him to America. But after living thousands of miles apart for so long, the three find they must discover one another’s strengths, forgive one another’s weaknesses, and bridge cultural and generational divides in order to build a life together. Told in three perspective-shifting chapters that honor the multitude of struggles and emotions that make up the immigrant experience, Farewell Amor is a bittersweet, compassionate evocation of how it feels when your heart and your home are in different places.
Directed by Ekwa Msangi and produced by Bobby Allen, Sam Bisbee, Ekwa Msangi, Huriyyah Muhammad, Josh Penn, and Joe Plummer.
Gotham Alum: Farewell Amor is an alumnus of the 2018 Project Market.
JANUARY 4
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Roxy Cinema
One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried aloft by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting—a spiritual tribute to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.
Directed by Raven Jackson and produced by Maria Altamirano, Mark Ceryak, Barry Jenkins, and Adele Romanski.
Gotham Alums: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an alumnus of the 2019 Project Market.
JANUARY 4
Wild Style
Roxy Cinema
Celebrated as a foundational depiction of early hip hop culture—and one of the first to engage cinematically with the lives and perspectives of the young people whose creativity fueled its development—Wild Style was conceived as a collaboration between young No Wave filmmaker Charlie Ahearn and the renowned street artist Fab 5 Freddy. The loose narrative follows Raymond (played by fellow practitioner Lee Quiñones), a precocious teenage graffiti writer in the Bronx known by the pseudonym “Zoro,” and his friend Phade (Fab 5 Freddy), a club promoter, as they navigate a scene fraught with artistic rivalries and a creative community that’s ambivalent about the interest it’s attracting from the upper-crust art world.
Filling out the cast with the Rock Steady Crew, Grandmaster Flash, and other pioneering talents of early hip hop culture playing versions of themselves, Ahearn’s film offers an extraordinary semi-documentary portrait of a vibrant cultural movement in its first flowering. A New Directors/New Films 1983 selection.
Directed and produced by Charlie Ahearn.
Gotham Alum: Wild Style is an alumnus of the 1982 Project Market.
JANUARY 5
Brief Tender Light
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
A Ghanaian filmmaker follows four African undergraduates through MIT, America’s premier technological university and his alma mater. The students embark on their MIT education with individual ambitions – to engineer infrastructure in Tanzania; to secure a better life for family in Nigeria; to contribute to postgenocide reconstruction in Rwanda; to advance democracy in Zimbabwe. Their missions are distinct, but fueled by a common goal: to become agents of positive change back home.
While their dreams are anchored in the societies they have left, their daily realities are defined by America – by the immediate challenges in their MIT classrooms, and by the larger social issues confronting the world beyond those classrooms. Their new environment demands they adapt. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.
Directed and produced by Arthur Musah.
Gotham Alum: Brief Tender Light is an alumnus of the 2022 Project Market.
JANUARY 8
Make Me Famous
Nitehawk Williamsburg
A madcap romp through the 1980’s NYC art scene amid the colorful career of painter, Edward Brezinski, hell-bent on making it. What begins as an investigation into Brezinski’s legacy and mysterious disappearance becomes a sharp, witty portrait of NYC’s 1980s downtown art scene resulting in an irresistible snapshot of an unknown artist that captures the spirit of an iconic era.
Directed by Brian Vincent and produced by Heather Spore and Brian Vincent.
Gotham Alum: Make Me Famous is an alumnus of the 2019 Gotham Week Project Market.
JANUARY 15
Brief Tender Light
POV
A Ghanaian filmmaker follows four African undergraduates through MIT, America’s premier technological university and his alma mater. The students embark on their MIT education with individual ambitions – to engineer infrastructure in Tanzania; to secure a better life for family in Nigeria; to contribute to postgenocide reconstruction in Rwanda; to advance democracy in Zimbabwe. Their missions are distinct, but fueled by a common goal: to become agents of positive change back home.
While their dreams are anchored in the societies they have left, their daily realities are defined by America – by the immediate challenges in their MIT classrooms, and by the larger social issues confronting the world beyond those classrooms. Their new environment demands they adapt. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.
Directed and produced by Arthur Musah.
Gotham Alum: Brief Tender Light is an alumnus of the 2022 Project Market.
JANUARY 20
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Nitehawk Prospect Park
One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried aloft by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting—a spiritual tribute to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.
Directed by Raven Jackson and produced by Maria Altamirano, Mark Ceryak, Barry Jenkins, and Adele Romanski.
Gotham Alums: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an alumnus of the 2019 Project Market.
JANUARY 26
Housekeeping for Beginners
Angelika Film Center
Dita never wanted to be a mother, but circumstances force her to raise her girlfriend’s two daughters: tiny troublemaker Mia and rebellious teen Vanesa. With the addition of a few local queer folks in need of refuge, her house becomes a shelter of sorts for outcasts.
A battle of wills ensues as Dita and the kids continue to butt heads and become an unlikely family that must fight to stay together. From acclaimed NewFest alum Goran Stolevski (Of An Age), this winner of Venice’s illustrious Queer Lion award is at its core a story about the universal truths of family — both the ones we’re born into and the ones we find for ourselves.
Directed by Goran Stolevski and produced by Marija Dimitrova, Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska, Ankica Jurić Tilić, Beata Rzeźniczek, Milan Stojanović, and Blerta Basholli.
Gotham Alum: Housekeeping For Beginners is an alumnus of the 2019 Biennale College Cinema. Biennale College Cinema is an incubator program created with the artistic partnership of The Gotham.
You can find our month-by-month Alumni on Screen blog posts here.
If your project is an alumnus of The Gotham programs and is being released this month, and you do not see it listed here, please contact us at [email protected]