Screenplay Official Selection

Tina Obo

Beyond Representation: Political Possibilities of Media in the 21st Century April 5th 1:00PM

Radford “Rad” Sechrist is the creator and executive producer of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. He’s also a storyboard artist and character designer who worked for a number of animation studios including DreamWorks Animation, Disney TV, and Cartoon Network. Rad has several years’ experience as a storyboarding and drawing instructor and has taught classes at California Institute of the Arts, Academy of Art University, Concept Design Academy, and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art. You can also visit Rad’s online school at www. radhowtoschool.com.

Tina Obo is a young Ugandan-South African animator who has a love for storytelling and creating 3D animations that are authentic to African culture. In 2019 Tina graduated from The Animation School South Africa. Her animated short, ‘The Sugarcane Man’ tells the story of the children exploited by the Ugandan Warlord, Joseph Kony. It won the gold medal for Student Films at the 2020 New York Festivals and was nominated at the 2020 BAFTA/LA Student Film Awards. Now she is currently collaborating on a personal project that uses silhouette animation which is a new style of animation for her. She also edits story scripts for people as a freelancer.

Ivy Film Festival is thrilled to bring together Professor Yoruba Richen, journalists Doreen St. Felix and Alyssa Rosenberg, and M88 founder Phil Sun for a conversation about art as a means for political and social change.

Structural inequities that have long impacted marginalized communities are now at the forefront of our cultural conversation. Both audiences and creators have been pushed to rethink the voices and narratives that are represented on screen, and those that are silenced. On a more structural level, initiatives like Hollywood 4 Black Lives and the Academy Inclusion Initiative are finally forcing the industry to take a closer look at the systemic factors that marginalize BIPOC and LGBTQ creatives.

In this changing cultural landscape, what is the role of storytelling and representation? How can film and television actualize much-needed change? In this conversation, we hope to go beyond slogans like “representation matters” and towards a more critical understanding of the connection between politics, media, and activism.

Doreen St. Félix graduated from Brown in 2014. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017, and was named the magazine’s television critic in 2019. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category. In 2016, she was listed in

Panelists

Yoruba Richen ‘00

Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on PBS, MSNBC, FX, New York Times Op Doc, Frontline Digital, The Atlantic and Field of Vision. Her film, How it Feels To Be Free, premiered on PBS’s American Masters in January of 2021. Her other recent films include, The New York Times Presents: The Killing of Breonna Taylor currently streaming on Hulu and The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show which is streaming on Peacock. Her previous film, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom was broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel and was nominated for an EMMY. Her films, The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and is a Sundance Producers Fellow. She is the 2016 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award and a Guggenheim Fellow. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Doreen St. Felix ‘14