Creative Projects
The Hanson FilmTV Institute provides a range of production and support services for alumni and filmmakers at the University of Arizona and often beyond campus, with particular outreach to innovative filmmakers working within the Latinx and Native American communities. Select projects, listed below, are a source of hands-on experience for students aspiring to creative and business professions in film and TV.
Apache 8
An all-women crew from the White Mountain Apache Tribe has been fighting fires on the Reservation and throughout the U.S. for more than 30 years. With humor and tenderness, four women from different generations of the Apache 8 crew share their personal stories. Directed by Hanson Fellow Sande Zeig, Apache 8 premiered at the Native American Film + Video Festival at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and screened across the U.S. on PBS. The film is now part of the Women Make Movies collection on Kanopy.
"The Hanson FilmTV Institute provided producing support for my documentary Apache 8 at a critical time, ensuring that it received post production funding and wide broadcast on public television nationally."
—Sande Zeig,
Hanson Fellow, Director/Producer
Almost an Island
Almost an Island is a cinematic portrait of an Inupiat family living above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska. Through observing three generations of one family over the course of four years, Almost an Island explores what it means to practice a traditional subsistence lifestyle in the dramatically changing Arctic. Directed by documentary filmmaker Jonathan VanBallenberghe, who received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, Almost an Island will be distributed by Vision Maker Media.
Hippie Family Values
Produced, directed and filmed by Beverly Seckinger, professor in the UA School of Theatre, Film & Television, Hippie Family Values is an intimate chronicle of back-to-the-land hippie elders and their adult children at a communal ranch in New Mexico. The film counters stereotypes with stories of people whose worldview was forged in the 1960s counterculture and who remain motivated by those convictions to this day. Among its awards, the film has earned the Outstanding Documentary Award by the University Film & Video Association, and the Utopian Documentary Award at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival. Learn more here.
Off the Street
In the wake of the civil unrest following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., teachers gathered a group of talented inner-city kids for a summer of art camp at Vermont Academy. Filmmaker Jere Michael, commissioned to document the experiment, offers a close-up view of the era’s race relations, still relevant today. Nearly 50 years after Off the Street was filmed, the Institute presented the documentary’s World Premiere and facilitated its placement in the archives of New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Waaki
Since the 1980s, the visual stories of UA alumnus Victor Masayesva (Hopi) have revealed the complexities and spiritual underpinnings of the Hopi worldview to film audiences and carved a path for subsequent generations of Indigenous filmmakers to tell their stories from a visually sovereign stance. Waaki, Masayesva’s latest film, celebrates the centrality of corn for the Hopi, Nahua and Maya, and explores the interrelationships among the Indigenous communities. The Hanson FilmTV Institute provided post-production services, helping to bring the film to Spanish-speaking audiences in the U.S. and Mexico, and presented an advance screening before its international premiere at the ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
The Wounaan Trilogy
Shot on 8mm in the 1960s in the Chocó rainforest of Columbia, these films on Wounaan culture never circulated publicly, in the interests of withholding cultural information from geologists who were in the early stages of exploring for oil in the region. Recently digitized with the help of the Hanson FilmTV Institute, they offer a remarkable record of a harmonious society before it would be transformed by violence in the region, increasingly forcing Indigenous peoples to flee. Co-directed by anthropologists Perry Kennedy and University of Arizona Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies Elizabeth Kennedy.