CIFF45 Streams preview: Everything you love about the Cleveland International Film Festival from the comfort of home
Updated 5:30 AM;
Today 5:30 AM
The Bring It Home slogan for the virtual 2021 Cleveland International Film Festival celebrates the connections we will form – even while we remain physically apart – when viewing the extraordinary on-screen stories created by our CIFF45 Streams filmmakers.
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CLEVELAND, Ohio This time last year, the small but dedicated team at the Cleveland International Film Festival was busy, trying to figure out a way to keep the popular 44th annual event alive after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled all large in-person gatherings just two weeks before opening night.
Human Rights Watch Film Festival shines light on inspirational women and justice fight express.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from express.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The female-focused event, which highlights women s leadership onscreen and in real life, has also revealed its other honorees and additional screenings and panel lineups.
The 11th annual Athena Film Festival has unveiled its 2021 honorees as well as set two more screenings and additional panels for its month-long virtual edition.
The female-focused event this year has also added another grant to its annual awards, launching the Chinonye Chukwu Emerging Writer Award, named for the
The Chukwu award, sponsored by Christine A. Schantz, will be given to a promising feature-length writer who participated in an Athena Film Festival Writers Lab. The winner will receive a $10,000 grant to assist in script development and a year-long writing fellowship with a creative advisor. The inaugural prize will be given to Jane Therese for
Ashley O’Shay as she opens up about her new documentary “
Unapologetic.”
After two Black Chicagoans are killed, millennial organizers challenge an administration complicit in state violence against its residents. Told through the lens of Janaé and Bella, two fierce abolitionist leaders, “Unapologetic” is a deep look into the movement for Black lives, from the police murder of Rekia Boyd to the election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
EURweb correspondent Ty Cole caught up with director Ashley O’Shay and rap’tivist
Bella BAHHS to discuss the film and how America has affected the lives of Black and brown people.
O’Shay on the opening scene of the documentary:
But for the two Black Lives Matter activists featured in the documentary
Unapologetic, they see a direct correlation between their work today and those of 150 years ago. “Incarceration is the 21st century version of slavery,” Janaé Bonsu states in director Ashley O’Shay’s film. “I feel like my role living in the 21st century is the same as those abolitionists who were alive during the slave era, like the Harriet Tubmans and the Frederick Douglasses.” O’Shay’s film follows Bonsu and fellow-activist Bella BAHHS as they organize protests in their native Chicago, and examines gender biases in national media coverage of police shootings.