Wonder Women!

The four women who shaped my experience at TriBeCa Film Festival

By Renato Dornelas ’17

 

 

You might know TriBeCa as one of the coolest neighborhoods in the south of Manhattan: long streets, a lot of diversity, beautiful sights, good food… Well, I know TriBeCa for something even cooler: the TriBeca Film Festival!

This past month, Skidmore’s MDOCS (John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative) program invited its students to attend a day of the festival and watch a screening in New York. I couldn’t miss this opportunity. So to give you a glimpse how amazing my day at TriBeCa was, I came up with a list of the top four most interesting people I met at the festival, whom I like to call WonderWomen! Here we go: 

4: Sharese Bailey-Bullock

Sharese is a very interesting, influential woman. She is the director of a project called TriBeCa Teaches, which gets artists from diverse backgrounds to teach young people the basics of filmmaking. The project takes place in prisons, dangerous neighborhoods and other places where opportunities to learn more about filmmaking and media wouldn’t be there otherwise. 

3: Barbara Grammashi

Barbara is a fantastic documentary film producer whose work has been featured in many festivals as well as on PBS. She is currently producing independent films, but her background goes all the way to producing for television’s Showtime. When I met her, she was telling us about the amazing power of opportunity—to give and to chase after opportunities. Simply inspiring!

2: Sonia Kennebek

Sonia is perhaps one of the coolest journalists I have talked to. Wait, one of the coolest investigative journalists I have talked to! She graduated college with an international affairs degree, so most of her films are related to politics and human rights issues. Her most recent documentary, Sex—Made in Germany, about the German prostitution industry, received excellent reviews and was an official selection at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2013.

1: Cecilia Aldarondo

Cecilia was the star of the night! Cecilia is an assistant professor in the English department at Skidmore and we there to support her documentary, Memories of a Penitent Heart. It tells the story of Cecilia’s uncle who, for the longest time, was hiding his biggest secret: he was gay. Cecilia’s family story is moving and emotional, and she is definitely a great and unique documentarian!

 The TriBeCa Film Festival was a great opportunity for me to not just learn more about this amazing field of documentary making, but also to meet some incredible professionals who have been innovating so much in the field. I look forward to the next adventure!