Good news for filmmaker Beverly Price came twice within the space of a week, when she learned she had been nominated for two Emmys and that her labor-of-love documentary had been accepted at the Urban Media Makers Film Festival in Atlanta.
Surprisingly, this was Price’s first festival entry, although she has been producing award-winning visual media for the past 22 years.
Price began her 90-minute documentary, “India of K-Town,” in August, 2008 when some friends told her about India Meadows, a senior at Christian Community Academy (CCA), who teasingly asked top local designer Barbara Bates if she would make her prom dress. When Bates said she would, Meadows wept.
Bates herself is a remarkable success story. Working as a secretary at a bank, she sold clothing she designed out of the women’s room during lunchtime. This led her to design clothes full time.
Ten years ago, she founded the Bates Foundation to provide prom dresses to under-privileged or hard-to-fit girls, based on her own experience as a teen-aged mother, who stayed in school and graduated.
Price spent nine months, until Meadows’ May, 2009 prom, following Meadows, her year-younger twin sisters and their friends through the impoverished K-Town neighborhood in North Lawndale as they told their stories.
In the course of following Meadows, “I learned that there were good families who wanted the best for their kids and would make sacrifices for them, like India’s adoptive mother, now 72, who took in the three girls from a devastating background.”
