fiscal sponsorship
Chocolate Milk
TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Post-Production
LOGLINE
Chocolate Milk is a social impact campaign and documentary addressing Black maternal and infant health through the lens of birth and breastfeeding outcomes in the United States.
SYNOPSIS
What do race, sex, nutrition and motherhood have in common? They all play a role in the gap between breastfeeding rates for African American women compared to White and Latino women in the U.S. From nutrition to bonding, breastfeeding is fundamental to the physical and emotional development of a healthy child. But if breastfeeding is so crucial, why aren’t more black mothers doing it? Chocolate Milk explores how slavery, economics, and society have influenced the way black Americans view intimacy, health and the right and wrong way to raise a child.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
As a filmmaker and public health professional my mission is to highlight social and health issues through narrative and documentary film. Three years ago, I learned about the disparity in breastfeeding among African American women and was struck by the link between breastfeeding and a reduced risk of infant mortality, infection, asthma, obesity, diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases that disproportionately affect the black community. With all the benefits of breastmilk, I knew there had to be some compelling reasons for the gap between breastfeeding rates for African American women compared to White, Latino and Asian women in the U.S - and I wasn't disappointed. Interviews with health experts, academics, and mothers revealed a complex web of social and economic pressures, including slavery and wet nursing, biased healthcare settings, inadequate maternity leave, and a $11.5 billion formula industry that targets low income and minority communities. These factors have made it difficult to establish breastfeeding as a social norm in the black community. But there is hope in the numerous women across the country who’ve organized to create culturally relevant breastfeeding support systems in their own communities. My goal is to create a compelling narrative that sheds light on the issue, its origins and the story of some courageous women who are working tirelessly to close the gap in birth and breastfeeding outcomes for Black mothers.
KEY CREW
Elizabeth Bayne - Director/Producer
Elizabeth Bayne is a producer, director and public health communications strategist. A member of Women in Film Los Angeles, Film Independent and the American Public Health Association, Elizabeth is committed to exploring health and social issues affecting marginalized communities. She has successfully bridged the worlds of public health and film to create over 250 impactful and engaging online videos, 4 public service campaigns, and 4 short films. Her work has been recognized with one Silver and three Bronze Telly Awards, a People’s Bronze Telly, a Gold CASE and CASE Circle of Excellence Silver Award, a Communicator Award, a Gold Davey Award and a Best Shorts Competition Award. Elizabeth is currently submitting her latest narrative work, LAS CHICAS (2016) to film festivals. Her next projects include television and several narrative films.
Sandra Valde - Director of Photography
Sandra Valde-Hansen is a freelance cinematographer with credits spanning feature films, documentaries, and television. Sandra got her start in documentary, working for an Emmy-award winning documentary cameramen, Tony Foresta, who taught her the beauty of the image is found in simplicity. She attended the American Film Institute’s MFA program in Cinematography where she now serves on the faculty. She had the invaluable opportunity to mentor under Stephen Lighthill, ASC, Steven Poster, ASC, Larry Parker, and Alan Caso, ASC. Since graduating from AFI, Sandra has been able to take her passion of cinematography throughout all mediums of storytelling. Sandra shot Gregg Araki’s last two features, KABOOM and WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD. Her work has screened at film festivals, including Sundance, South by Southwest (SXSW), and Cannes.
Kalilah Robinson - Cinematographer
Kalilah Robinson is an award winning cinematographer and filmmaker. Born and raised in Bermuda Kalilah attended Stanford University where she studied Psychology and Film Studies. Robinson worked as a freelance filmmaker on numerous projects ranging from music videos, web series and commercials, to reality TV, documentaries and narrative feature films. In 2010, Robinson founded Somers Isle Productions, an independent production company dedicated to the development of film and television projects about Bermuda’s rich cultural heritage. In 2016 Kalilah graduated from The American Film Institute’s cinematography masters program. In 2017 she was a Film Independent Project Involve Cinematography Fellow. And in 2017 Robinson’s AFI thesis film, LAWMAN, which she shot and co-produced won the ViZio + Dolby Vision Cinematography Award.
Mark Harris - Humanities Advisor
Professor Mark Jonathan Harris, of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, is an Academy-Award winning documentary filmmaker, journalist and novelist. Among the many documentaries he has written, produced and/or directed are The Redwoods, a documentary made for the Sierra Club to help establish a redwood National Park, which won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 1968. The Long Way Home (1997), a film made for the Simon Wiesenthal Center about the period immediately following the Holocaust won the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary (1997). Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport was produced for Warner Bros. and won an Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 2000. In 2014, it was also selected for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry.
Marta Effinger-Crichlow, Ph.D - Humanities Advisor
Professor Effinger-Crichlow is the Chair of the African American Studies Department of the New York City College of Technology. The author of Staging Migrations Toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones by University Press of Colorado, her other writings are included in African American Lives, Theatre Journal, African American Review, Footsteps: Children’s Magazine, Journal of Black Studies, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Effinger-Crichlow is also a dramaturg, playwright, and filmmaker. She served as the project director and co-investigator for CityTech’s first ever National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant project entitled Retentions and Transfigurations: The Technological Evolution and Social History of Five New York City Neighborhoods. Effinger-Crichlow is currently an IFP JustFilms Fellow, where she is completing her feature-length documentary Little Sallie Walker. It tells the story of a diverse group of black women and girls who depend upon childhood play to survive girlhood and even womanhood in America.
Kimberly Seals Allers - Humanities Advisor
Kimberly Seals Allers is an award-winning journalist, author and a nationally recognized media commentator, consultant and advocate for breastfeeding and infant health. A former senior editor at ESSENCE and writer at FORTUNE magazine, Kimberly is widely considered a leading voice in the counterculture movement in infant feeding. Last year, her online commentaries on the social, structural and racial complexities of maternal and child health issues received over 10 million page views. Kimberly’s fifth book, The Big Let Down—How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding, published by St. Martin’s Press, is available everywhere starting January 24th, 2017. She is currently the project director for The First Food Friendly Community Initiative (3FCI), a W.K. Kellogg-funded pilot project in Detroit and Philadelphia and is the former editorial director of The Black Maternal Health Project of Women’s eNews. In 2011, Kimberly was named an IATP Food and Community Fellow focused on reframing breastfeeding disparities as a food systems issue.
Jacqueline Wolf - Humanities Advisor
Professor Wolf is an Advisor and assistant professor in the history of medicine, Department of Social Medicine, Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and adjunct assistant professor, Women's Studies Program, Ohio University. Wolf is the author of Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the host of Health Vision, a weekly show on contemporary health and medicine airing on the PBS affiliate in Southeast Ohio.
Connect With The Filmmakers:
$253,864
$223,075
It's tax deductible!
ACCOLADES
UPDATE - March 17, 2019
Last year we recieved the great honor of being awarded a grant from the W.K.Kellogg Foundation to complete our film!
The grant amount of $197,273 will allow us to complete production and post-production with the goal of screening the film later this year for National Breastfeeding Month in August. Many thanks to all of our supporters from 2016 to today who've helped make this film a reality!
UPDATE - July 12, 2017
My production company graybayne film/media was awarded a CCI Creative Economic Development Fund Grant towards the production of Chocolate Milk. The grant amount of $12,500 will cover the purchase of equipment and sotware that will allow us to reduce rental costs and reallocate funds towards crew and travel.
Many thanks to the Center for Cultural Innovation!
UPDATE - November 03, 2016
We have some exciting news! Chocolate Milk now has the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) as a fiscal sponsor, making all donations tax-deductible. We also had our first pledge this summer from Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere (ROSE) for $1,500 and our first official donation of $100 from an anonymous attendee at the Black Mothers' Breastfeeding Association (BMBFA) Seminar this October! In addition, we have secured partnerships with the following non-profits to provide expertise and help get the word out about the film:
Soul Food for Your Baby
ROSE
BreastfeedLA
BMBFA
La Leche League USA
National Medical Association
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