FIRELIGHT MEDIA INC
72 Hamilton Terrace, New York, NY 10031 www.firelightmedia.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: Firelight Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing talented documentary filmmakers who tell stories about people, places, cultures and issues that are under represented in the mainstream media. Firelight Media's flagship program is the Documentary Lab, a mentorship program for emerging diverse producers. Participating producers work with award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson and his team of senior producers, writers, editors, new media, and fundraising specialists to complete their projects for a national broadcast. Firelight Media started the Producers' Lab as a way to provide infrastructure support for diverse producers to help overcome some of the barriers to completing their film or video.

Firelight Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing talented documentary filmmakers who tell stories about people, places, cultures and issues that are under represented in the mainstream media.

Documentary Lab:Firelight Medias Documentary Lab, our key platform s for artistic support, provided free services to 60+ emerging filmmakers of color including current Documentary Lab participants, program Alumni who still accessed our mentoring and impact services, and participants in the Groundwork Regional Labs, and our Impact Producers Lab. During that time, Documentary Lab filmmakers accomplished the following:1.Jackie Olives film Always in Season and Jeffrey Palmers Film, Words of A Bear for exhibition premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Sundance awarded Jackie Olive a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award and nominated her for the Grand Jury Prize. Always in Season also won the Grand Jury Prize Documentary at the Dallas Film Festival and the Human Rights Award at the River Run Film International Film Festival. Always in Season is opening in theaters and is scheduled for broadcast on Independent Lens. Words of a Bear will be broadcast on American Masters. 2.Sabaah Folayan and Damon Daviss Whose Streets? received a Peabody nomination.3.Tribeca Film Institute awarded an All Access Grant to Dbora Souza, Black Mothers4.The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) Fund awarded - Tim Tsai, Seadrift., a production grant. Doc Lab alumni Ligaiya Romero and Jason daSilva also received CAAM funding and a Documentary for Social Change Award5.Ral Ruiz Pastrana's film premiered at Sheffield Film Festival, and DocsMX festival in Mexico City. 6.Eddie Martinez was accepted into the Rockwood Fellowship7.Chelsea Hernandez premiered her film Building The American Dream at SXSW Festival.8.IDA awarded grants to Documentary Lab filmmakers and alumni including Eddie Martinez for Corsicans, April Dobbins for Alabamaland, and Cecilia Aldarondo Untitled film about Puerto Rico 9.Ja' Tovia Gary (Doc Lab Alumni) was selected as one of four Field of Vision fellows!10.Malika Zhouhali-Worrall received a Chicken & Egg's Breakthrough Award for mid-career women filmmakers (Doc Lab Alumni)11.Daresha Kyi and Nausheen Dadabhoy selected for the Chicken & Egg Accelerator Lab. (Doc Lab Alumni). Dareshi Kyi also just won an Emmy Award for her short documentary: Trans in America: Texas Strong.Documentary Lab Retreats: In 2019 the Documentary Lab conducted two retreats one in Santa Cruz, CA and one in Mohonk, NY that 24 emerging filmmakers of color attended.Career Development: Digital Shorts Master in the Making:To provide additional career-path opportunities for Documentary Lab filmmakers and Alumni Firelight Media created a partnership with American Masters. In 2019 eight Documentary Lab Alumni created short films about the lives and journeys of artists and cultural icons that bring insight and originality to their craft. Firelight and American Masters provided funding and jointly selected the film topics and filmmakers. American Masters will showcase the films on digital and social media platforms with additional distribution partners to be announced.Career Development: The Frontline x Frontline FellowshipAfter working with FRONTLINE throughout 2018 to craft a partnership, we are delighted to report we launched the FRONTLINE/Firelight Fellowship in the early fall 2018! This news fellowship supported diverse independent makers interested in journalistic documentary filmmaking. This fellowship seeks to address the need for more diverse voices, perspectives, and experiences within the field of investigative journalism. These Fellows worked with FRONTLINE, periodically in residencies at the Boston FRONTLINE headquarters and in New York City, to report and create short documentary films for the series, considering along the way transmedia and platform-agnostic approaches. In October 2018 FRONTLINE and Firelight Media partnered with the Double Exposure Film Festival to announce that Juliana Schatz Preston and Roopa Gogineni were the FRONTLINE/Firelight inaugural fellows. On October 7-10, 2019 The Double Exposure Film Festival will roll out the Frontline Fellow Julianna Schatz Prestons short film, Waiting for Tearah.Groundwork Regional Labs:Groundwork grew out of our experience with Doc Lab retreats in various cities, to which we invited local filmmakers in underserved areas of the American south, Midwest and U.S. territories to attend free in-depth workshops and master classes on fundraising, proposal writing, work sample creation, and professional development. During 2019 Firelight conducted the following Groundwork Regional Labs that served a total of 40 local filmmakers:El Paso, Texas (October 2018). Firelight conducted the third Groundwork Documentary Lab in partnership with KCOS, the Museum & Cultural Affairs Department El Paso, and Femme Frontera, a collective of women filmmakers from the U.S.-Mexico border region. It is important to note that the filmmakers in El Paso seemed the least informed and connected to the wider field of nonfiction and public media. The group asked a lot of basic level questions but they were extremely engaged. The Lab ended with a panel on local opportunities and words of wisdom featuring Emily Loyola from KCOS, Rebecca Muoz from the Museum & Cultural Affairs Department El Paso and Angie Torres from Femme Frontera. San Juan, Puerto Rico (May 2019): Groundwork PR was co-produced with local partners, the Association of Puerto Rican Documentary Filmmakers (ADocPR), Sistema TV-WMTJ, a PBS member station located in San Juan, the Museo de Arte Contemporneo Puerto Rico and the University Ana G. Mndez. The program began with a public screening of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution at the Ana G. Mndez University Theatre, which was followed by a Q&A with director and executive producer Stanley Nelson and moderated by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, founder of The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. The weekend also included a workshop with work-in-progress screenings, and feedback sessions for the 16 nominated local filmmakers. Loira Limbal- Firelights Vice-President and Documentary Lab Director led the workshop in Spanish. Groundwork PR served 14 culturally and ethnically diverse emerging filmmakers who lived on the island.Below please find a quote from Gisela Rosario Ramoss blog: Groundwork in PR: An Oasis in a Filmmaking Desert - A Puerto Rican Filmmaker Reflects on Firelights Groundwork initiative. Firelight Media arrived well represented and very well prepared. The women in charge have the perfect combination of knowledge, passion and tact, necessary to face a group thirsty for information. I felt extremely comfortable asking questions that may have felt very obvious but, in their responses, I never felt any judgment. Definitely, it has been for me the most beneficial workshops I have taken in recent years. Her full blog can be found here:https://medium.com/@firelightmedia/groundwork-pr-an-oasis-in-a-filmmaking-desert-f03e9552867aLincoln, NE (August 2019) Firelight Media joined our community partners Vision Maker Media, The Flaherty, Humanities Nebraska and NET (Nebraska public television) to host our Groundwork Lab as part of the Vision Maker Media Producer Training in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Groundwork Lab kicked off with a screening curated by The Flaherty - showcasing short films by and in close collaboration with Native communities. 16 Native non-fiction filmmakers participated in Groundwork and Visionmakers three days of in depth workshops and trainings dedicated to increasing the number of American Indians and Alaska Natives who produce and direct quality public broadcasting programs. Workshop facilitators included: Jon Sesrie-Goff, The Flaherty Curated Program; Firelights Documentary Lab Manager, Chloe Walters-Wallace; Njeri Eaton, National Public Radio; Joe Turco, Executive Producer & General Manager Nebraska Public Television NET; and Mary Yager, CPM, Associate Director, Humanities Nebraska.Films by Firelight: In the fall of 2018 we launched Films by Firelight, a free public documentary screening and discussion series in community venues in Harlem. These free and low-cost screenings featured the award-winning documentaries produced by the Documentary Lab filmmakers and selected films from Stanley Nelsons vault. Firelight conducted these screenings at the Apollo Theater, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Maysles Documentary Institute, and Imagenations Raw Space. Films by Firelight 2018 -2019 included nine public screenings followed by Q&As with the filmmakers, which over 2,500 attended. During the grant period the Films by Firelight team also planned to co-host a Films by Firelight selection at the October 3-5, 2019 Liberacion Film Festival in NYC.Impact Producers Lab: Firelight also implemented the second year of our Impact Producers Lab Fellows, a program to increase diversity in the media impact field by training eight participants in core competencies of impact producing. Firelight trained 8 Impact Fellows (a combination of filmmakers and activists) to reach and engage audiences of

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