Two Chicago filmmakers feel honored that their films were among the only 18 narrative and documentary films chosen from a record 5,000-plus submissions for the 16th annual Slamdance Film Festival.
Rashid Ghazi’s feature-length documentary “Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football” and Todd Looby’s short narrative-doc hybrid “Son of None” will play at the “by filmmakers, for filmmakers” fest, running Jan. 21-27 in Park City, Utah.
World premiering at Slamdance, Ghazi’s “Fordson” is about the largely Arab Muslim Fordson High School football team in Dearborn, Michigan, whose big game happens to fall during the fasting period of Ramadan as well as the eight anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The film shows this group of many second and third-generation Americans still fighting for acceptance from some of their neighbors, holding onto both the traditions of their faith and their all-American sports culture.
Ghazi produced through his North Shore Films, in associations with CNN producers Ash-har and Basma Quraishi’s Quraishi Productions. Ruth Leitman (“Tony and Janina’s American Wedding”) is the writer of “Fordson.” Ed Pickart of Motion Post edited.
A veteran TV sports producer, Ghazi is a partner at Deerfield-based Paragon Marketing Group. He was co-winner of 2010 Promo & Activation Grand Prix and the PR Grand Prix Awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for the Gatorade “Replay” spot.
A 50/50 mix of narrative and documentary, Looby’s “Son of None” is the story a quiet, sensitive orphan of the Liberian civil war adapting to life at a Catholic boarding school.
While at Sundance Looby also will shop his death penalty project
Looby made "Son of None" while he was in Liberia shooting the six-part promotional web series, "Children of Hope: The Liberia Mission Story," for Liberia Mission, Inc., the group that runs the school. Looby's wife Monica Desmond is director of operations and communications at the local nonprofit.
"Son of None" had its local premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival in October. It screens Jan. 22 and 25 in Slamdance's Short Block #2 program.
While he's in Park City, Looby will be seeking support for his in-development narrative feature "A Saint on Death Row," which Looby is adapting from bestselling writer Thomas Cahill's nonfiction book about Dominique Green, a Dallas man whose questionable death sentence sparked international outcry.
"The treatment will be ready to shop around in Park City and the issue of the death penalty in Texas and Illinois is very hot right now," Looby says.
A Texas judge is currently holding hearings on the constitutionality of that state's death penalty, after a pair of recent controversial executions. And early in 2011, the Illinois legislature is expected to consider a bill that would abolish the death penalty here.
Looby and Desmond's feature-length documentary, "Solo Madres," about mothers in Honduras whose husbands have gone north in search of work, won a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, enabling the filmmakers to hire editor Ramiro Castro of Big Dog Eat Child to produce a final cut.
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