“Women Rising: Stories of Strength and Change,” LTV Studio’s current film series celebrating the resilience and courage of women from diverse backgrounds, will return to Wainscott Friday evening at 7:30 with “Footsteps on the Wind” (2021) an animated short, and “No Fear No Favor” (2020), a documentary feature.
Directed by Maya Sanbar, Faga Melo, and Gustavo Leal, and produced by Gillian Gordon, a Springs resident, and Fernanda Zaffari, “Footsteps on the Wind” follows the plight of Noor and her little brother, Josef, as they journey far from home after being orphaned by a devastating earthquake.
Sting gave his refugee-inspired song “Inshallah” to the directors so they could create an animated film as a therapy tool for traumatized refugee children. The 17-time Grammy Award-winning artist and his wife, Trudie Styler, co-founded the Rainforest Fund in 1987 with Franca Sciuto. “Footsteps” is the first animated film ever made to a song by Sting.
“It’s a big responsibility to show the refugee experience of millions of people, each with their own situations, in just seven minutes, so we have a lot so say — and with animation we were able to use symbolism and shortcuts to messaging that was important to us from our research,” said Ms. Sanbar during an interview on viddy-well.com. “We made the animation very colorful and warm, because the artworks that came from our storytelling workshops with refugees were extremely colorful and hopeful.”
Winner of the best animated short film award at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif., the film has been shown in 30 festivals worldwide.
“No Fear No Favor,” written and directed by Mirra Bank and produced by Richard Brockman and Ms. Bank, illuminates the difficult choices faced by rural Africans who live on the front lines of the continent’s poaching crisis.
Filmed over several years in Zambia’s vast Kafue National Park, as well as in North Kenya and Namibia, the film follows local women and men who fight the illegal wildlife trade through both cooperative law enforcement and community-led conservation that sustains wildlife, returns profit to local people, and generates new livelihoods.
“ ‘No Fear No Favor’ began with my concern about the alarming loss of species throughout our world, and my need to discover some working solutions to this problem that we have created,” according to a statement by Ms. Bank, who drew on her relationships with environmental groups, especially the Nature Conservancy, to gain access to programs that sustain wildlife and different habitats in Africa.
Ms. Bank and Dr. Brockman, her husband, longtime residents of East Hampton, constituted a two-person crew and used lightweight HDV cameras in areas that were mostly off the grid. Their goal was to discover what could reverse the dynamic, so that poachers would become protectors.
The answer emerged through the stories of their key characters: Anety, a single mother who works as a wildlife police officer; Kingsley, a former poacher who now protects wild elephants; Kelvin, who teaches the value of wildlife to schoolchildren, and Patricia, a U.K. and U.S.A.-trained Ph.D. who returned to Zambia to help start community-led conservation in her home country.
“No Fear No Favor” has been screened at many film festivals, including Hamptons Doc Fest, where in 2019 it received the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Environmental Award and the Filmmakers Choice Award.
“Women Rising” is curated by Annette Danto, a filmmaker and chairwoman of the Brooklyn College Film Department. After the screening, there will be a discussion among Ms. Gordon, Ms. Bank, and Ms. Danto.
Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door, and $35 for cafe tables, which include front-row seating and a drink.
