Twenty-five filmmakers from around the globe benefit from Academy’s support over the last year.
In 2013, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation renewed its partnership with The MacDowell Colony by awarding a $15,000 grant for filmmaker residencies. Up 30 percent from the previous year’s grant, the support provided residencies for 25 filmmakers from across the U.S. and around the world. The grant also helped MacDowell incorporate film into its recently launched Voices of Change initiative by bringing filmmakers from Turkey, Egypt, and Syria to Peterborough, NH.
Since its launch more than 40 years ago, The MacDowell Colony’s filmmaker residency program has led to the creation of powerful new films in many different genres and has given filmmakers a rare opportunity for professional and creative growth in an inspiring multidisciplinary community of artists. And over the past decade, the number of film residencies has quadrupled, making film one of the Colony’s fastest-growing disciplines.
Filmmakers who come to The MacDowell Colony have said they are not only grateful for the opportunity and support they find while in residency, but often go on to produce impressive and noteworthy projects. Here are some film highlights from the past year:
•At the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Jesse Moss received a U.S. documentary special jury award for “intuitive filmmaking” for The Overnighters, a look at a small-town ministry in North Dakota.
•Sam Green’s documentary, The Measure of All Things, screened at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
•Matthew Rankin wrote a complete first draft of his feature-length historical film about the doomed 1912 Robert Falcon Scott expedition to the South Pole called, The Worst Journey in the World, which received a major award from the Canada Council for the Arts.
•Matt Wolf's historical documentary film Teenage premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and will be released nationwide in spring 2014, starting with a theatrical premiere at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in New York.
•Joyce Maynard’s novel Labor Day, which she wrote while at MacDowell, was adapted into a recently released feature film starring Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet.
•Dee Rees will adapt and direct Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip for the big screen. She has also recently finished an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Home, which she worked on at The MacDowell Colony.
“As I returned to MacDowell after an eight year absence, I was both eager and anxious,” said Jesse Moss about his most recent experience at MacDowell. “But in the span of two short weeks – in which time seemed to stretch impossibly, and my residency felt limitless – I found the same remarkable space to focus on my work, to discover pathways to new projects and collaborations, and make new friends."
Moss explained that the opportunity to share his film, albeit in a fragmented form, with an audience of MacDowell fellows brought about a discussion that led to great insights.
“I undertook a new writing project that had long been contemplated but never confronted,” added Moss. “And rather spontaneously, I worked with Michael Almereyda, my Colony neighbor, on a film project.”
Such success stories point out the importance of grants such as that awarded by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation as MacDowell looks forward to partnering with the Academy again in 2014 to sustain the program’s growth and energy and to help filmmakers at home and abroad advance their careers.
