Echo Park Film Center

Fund: $36,000

Echo Park Film Center (EPFC)—a media arts organization committed to providing underserved communities with equal access to film and video recourses through screenings, residencies, and educational programs—will present The Newsreel Project, which invites filmmakers to create new analog films about transformative communities around California, exploring notions of place, identity, and inclusion. This project was inspired by the 1960s experimental “newsreels” of Canyon Cinema co-founder Bruce Baillie, who created lyrical, non-didactic cinematic portraits of spaces and people working to make the world a better place. Artists will shoot their projects on 16mm EPFC equipment, assisted by an EPFC Co-op member, and use the Center’s new LA AIRport—a mobile cinema/artist residency/film lab in a customized trailer—for various aspects of production. Project artists Arshia Haq, Caitlin Díaz, Kate Dollenmayer, Nora Sweeney, Tuni Chatterji, and Walter Vargas will be paired with young artists from the EPFC’s youth filmmaking program, who will gain hands-on experience working with an established filmmaker. Community-based presentations of the films will run from July 2020 through December 2020 at various sites via the LA AIRport. In keeping with the tradition of newsreels, the works will also be screened before regularly scheduled programs shown on-site at the Center for the duration of the project. Additionally, two 16mm copies of each work will be made, one for the artists and one for the EPFC film archive.