Venerable Kartemquin Films, now helmed by recently-appointed executive director Justine Nagan, is embarking on a number of new initiatives to assure its viability and growth, even in these tough times.
One of these new initiatives is a paid Diversity Fellowship, which in September will award a minority filmmaker ? to be selected from 12 nominees ? the wherewithal to produce his film.
The Fellow’s documentary or short must be socially relevant, of course, because those are the themes that Kartemquin has been dramatizing for 42 years.
Kartemquin’s first film in 1966 was “Home for Life,” about two elderly people entering a home for the aged. Its most recent was Joanna Rudnick’s 2008 “In the Family,” about predicting breast and ovarian cancer.
In between, Kartemquin has produced 32 acclaimed documentaries on subjects that help gain understanding of society through everyday human drama, such as its “New Americans” series.
For the first time, the film library is being organized for distribution as a revenue stream to augment funding from grants, for its $1 million operating budget.
