Join us for a discussion exploring the many ways that documentary storytelling can create social change. A panel of documentary professionals come together to discuss how they’ve carried their messages beyond the screen to create engagement from audiences and respond to social issues and injustices. Subjects that will be discussed include impact and outreach strategy, partnerships, and engaging with the media.

There will be a mixer in the lobby of the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center immediately following the panel discussion.

Moderator:
Christopher Everett is an independent film director, producer, and curator, based in Wilmington, North Carolina. Christopher is the Program Manager at the Southern Documentary Fund and is the founder of Speller Street Films and Black Kung Fu Cinema. He’s a recent Firelight Media Doc Lab Fellow and is the guest curator at The Cary Theater in Cary, NC for their Kung Fu Film Series. His debut feature documentary Wilmington on Fire chronicles the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. He’s currently in post-production on Wilmington on Fire: Chapter II and also Grandmaster: The Vic Moore Story which looks at the life and teachings of martial arts pioneer Grandmaster Victor Moore.

Panelists:
Aalam-Warqe Davidian is an Ethiopian-Israeli film director. Her directorial debut, Fig Tree, was an Ophir Award nominee for Best Picture in 2018. Her film With No Land is an Official Selection for the 4th Annual Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival.

Mikki Harris uses a journalistic approach to understanding the cultural context of community, both past, and present through the use of innovative visual storytelling. She is a multimedia journalist whose work over the past 20 years has focused on community-based power as examined through the tools of journalism and cultural studies. She uses storytelling to shift perspective in dynamic ways that both preserve and carry culture. She uses oral history, documentary photojournalism, and video, as well as writing to document and shape stories of impact. Her article and photos in National Geographic provide a look into this work.

Hal Jacobs brings a career in freelance writing and developing written and video resources for higher education into film work that focuses on arts, social justice, and the environment. Hal’s film Common Good Atlanta documentary is an Official Selection for the 4th Annual Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival. He lives in Decatur, Georgia with his wife Alicia, who is a librarian at Fernbank Elementary School and often a contributing editor for HJC projects.

Daresha Kyi is an Emmy award winner who writes, produces, and directs documentary and narrative films and all kinds of television in Spanish and English. A natural-born storyteller, she made her first short, experimental film, Schism, at the age of 16. As a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she was awarded a Tisch Scholars fellowship and graduated with a degree in Film & TV. Her award-winning student film, The Thinnest Line, helped her receive grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations to fund her second film, Land Where My Fathers Died.