fiscal sponsorship
Rooted
TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Post-Production
LOGLINE
GERMAINE JENKINS—urban farmer, activist, and a Black mother—is taking on the power structure in North Charleston, SC, to save her cooperative farm, Fresh Future Farm (FFF), and end the food apartheid that has ravaged her community for decades. Through the lens of Germaine’s relentless battle with City Hall, the food justice documentary ROOTED follows her coming-to-power as a leader.
SYNOPSIS
In 2014, GERMAINE JENKINS convinced the North Charleston City Council to lease her a sliver of a weed-covered vacant lot so she could grow food and prop up a small grocery store for a community that hadn't had access to fresh produce in over a decade. She garnered a five-year lease on the .8 acre plot on Success Street to create Fresh Future Farm (FFF), a feat only Germaine, an unassumingly charismatic Black woman and food justice rising star, could accomplish. That lease is now up. Yet despite raising funds to buy the farmland, the arms of racial injustice deny her request, pushing her to the edge of what it means to be Black in America.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
ROOTED is both an intimate portrait of a farmer and a call to action, exposing our society's most pressing social justice issue, Food Aparthied. The film aims to provide a deeper understanding of how this powerful movement is dismantling the racism inherent in our food systems.
As a citizen and a filmmaker, I can no longer have this blindspot within my own activism and storytelling– and being able to tell this story is my opportunity to encourage others to do the same. In Germaine’s own words, “In the pie chart of your activism, there has to be a place for food justice.”
KEY CREW
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Bridget Besaw - Director | Producer | Cinematograhper
Bridget is a New England Emmy-nominated filmmaker and founder of Seedlight Pictures. Before finding her second passion as a director, Bridget enjoyed a career as an award-winning newspaper and magazine photographer, capturing national stories for Smithsonian, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic among others. As a Nikon Ambassador and Leica sponsored photographer, Bridget created large scale documentary projects for The Nature Conservancy in all corners of the globe. Bridget is the author of two photography books—Wildness Within, Wildness Without (2008) and From The Land (2012). The creation of these books inspired her to start using her skills as a visual storyteller to rally attention for wilderness preservation and food sustainability. Since that pivot, Bridget has shot, directed, and produced numerous shorts for environmental NGOs on resource depletion and sustainability. Her first independent film project culminated in the Growing Local series (2015), and screened to acclaim at festivals nationwide. Her short film Seeding A Dream (2015), won several audience choice awards and was a finalist for the DCEFF Eric Moe Sustainability Award. Her two latest shorts, Guided and The Nature Of Maps, both toured the 2016-2017 festival circuits winning audience choice awards. Bridget’s feature doc in progress The Mountain and The Magic City, was supported by the LEF Foundation and invited to the Points North Institute Fellowship and the PNI/TFI Retreat. Bridget is proud to be a board member of the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Institute, and to be a board advisor to the Chewonki Foundation.
Par Parekh - Editor | Producer
Par Parekh‘s work as a filmmaker has placed him in many roles—director, writer, producer, editor, and cinematographer. Par recently made his narrative directorial debut with the short THE HAPPY, which will premiere at SeriesFest in June 2019. He produced and co-wrote Benh Zeitlin’s GLORY AT SEA, winner of the Wholphin Best Short Film Award at SXSW, and edited Dana O’Keefe’s short narrative THE NEW YORKIST, which was in competition at Tribeca Film Festival. He’s also produced and shot short documentaries for the Haitian Government to present at the World Economic Forum. Par edited a feature-length documentary about Cameron Crowe’s film ALOHA. Before his documentary and narrative work, Par spent a decade creating promotional videos for such musical talents as Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, and fashion clients such as Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Macy’s. He was named one of Austin Film Festival’s 20 Screenwriters To Watch in 2020, and is represented by Artists First.
Bernard Parham - Co-Producer
Bernard Parham is an Emmy-winning TV and documentary film producer. His areas of interest are racial justice, sexual identity, and gender expression. His TV credits inclue Netflix’s Queer Eye, CNN’s United Shades of America, and HBO Max’s Legendary. Additionally, he has produced several feature-length documentaries: most recently the Netflix Original film Grass is Greener–an exploration of the ways race and criminal justice have distorted the legal and underground cannabis trade. Bernard is thrilled to join the Rooted team because food justice is central to racial justice, and no liberation movement can truly succeed without resolving the problem of food security.
Hope Hall - Cinematographer
Hope Hall is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. Her short films have been selected for over 40 film festivals worldwide and have received numerous awards, including at Sundance. She has a BA from UC Berkeley, an MA from Stanford, and is a proud graduate of the Independent Studio Program at the Whitney Museum. After working on the feature documentary, "BY THE PEOPLE" by Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, which followed then-Senator Obama's trajectory into candidacy, she joined the '08 campaign's now legendary New Media team as a staff filmmaker, telling the story from the campaign trail and making over 40 videos. From May 2011 to January 2017, she was President Obama's Principal Videographer at the White House in the Office of Digital Strategy. Her work can be seen in various projects including, BEYOND CONVICTION, AND SHE COULD BE NEXT, RACING DREAMS, THE FIGHT, SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL, as well as a multi-channel installation videos featured in the Guggenheim Museum's Art of the Motorcycle exhibition in Las Vegas. Most recently she was the Senior Advisor for Video & Senior Road Videographer for Elizabeth Warren 2020 presidential campaign.
Kathryn Bostic - Composer
Veteran composer Kathryn Bostic is known for her work on film, TV and live theater. She is a recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the prestigious Sundance Time Warner Fellowship, Sundance Fellowship for Feature Film Scoring, Sundance/Skywalker Documentary Film Scoring and the BMI Conducting Fellowship. Kathryn was the VP of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, and her credits include CLEMENCY (2019), CAMERAPERSON (2016), and DEAR WHITE PEOPLE (2014) and an Emmy nomination for TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM (2019).
Ali Hart - Impact Producer
Ali recently produced AMERICAN HAZE, a short documentary on immigrants for Sundance Now, as well as a 5-part documentary web series called SPOTLIGHT CALIFORNIA for billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. Ali has over a decade of experience using entertainment to influence culture, including strategizing grassroots campaigns for feature films from Participant Media, PBS, Ford Foundation, Tiffany Shlain, Petra Costa, Rick Rosenthal, and Cullen Hoback, to name a few.
Jason Pollard - Story Advisor
Jason’s introduction to film began at an early age through his parents, Sam and Glenda. As a result of their influence, Jason studied film at New York University. In 2007, he co-edited PETE SEEGER: THE POWER OF SONG, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. He also co-edited SING YOUR SONG, a documentary about the life of singer/activist Harry Belafonte which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In 2012, he edited the PBS documentary SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Jason has received a degree in Bachelors in Fine Arts in Film & Television and a Masters in Cinema Studies, both from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
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