Sunflower County Film Academy Awarded $4K Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi Grant
Jume 3, 2023 - CLEVELAND, MS - A summer workshop designed to teach filmmaking and Digital Media skills to high school students in the Mississippi Delta received a $4,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi (CFNM). The grant will support the 2023 Sunflower County Film Academy (SCFA) which will be held at the Delta Arts Alliance (DAA) in Cleveland June 5 through June 30.
The CFNM has granted $33 million in aid to more than 800 non-profit organizations that are “making a difference in the quality of life” in 11 northwest Mississippi counties since its founding in 2002.
“CFNM is proud to support the Sunflower County Film Academy, in partnership with a longtime nonprofit partner Delta Arts Alliance, for the summer film workshop,” said the Foundation’s Development Director Stacye Trout. “This grant will not only support high school students learning about the rich history of the Mississippi Delta, but they will be able to creatively share the culture with the world.”
The purpose of the SCFA is to offer Mississippi Delta students, most of whom are students of color, training for careers in the entertainment industry.
Initiated in 2018, the SCFA is a free summer workshop that offers students training in filmmaking using professional-grade equipment. The workshop offers two forms of engagement. Students learn about the rich and cultural history of the Delta in a classroom setting. And they create their own video narratives from concept to scripting to shooting, editing, and screening their film on the last day of class.
“We are so grateful for the support of Mr. Fulcher, Ms. Trout and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi,” said SCFA Administrator Monica Land. “We want our students to have broader career choices. So many of them are already expressing themselves artistically and creatively on social media through video stories. We want to help them develop that ability and hopefully take it farther as a career option in the film and television industry.”
“Our mission at CFNM is to impact communities in the areas of Youth, Health, and Education. We are pleased to fund this project to help youth advance their film and digital media education skills,” Trout said.
Prior SCFA workshops were held in Indianola and Sumner and all instructors are professional and award-winning filmmakers. Instructors for 2023 include Glenn Payne of Dead Leaf Productions, Professor Ted Fisher of Delta State University and Ben Powell of Broken Arm Studio. In 2022, SCFA organizers partnered with the Delta Arts Alliance for future workshops. Powell also conducts after-school filmmaking programs for younger students at the Delta Arts Alliance.
The SCFA is part of the K-12 curriculum for Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, a multimodal project that explores and celebrates the life of the Sunflower County native. Hamer, a Mississippi-sharecropper-turned-civil-rights-activist, helped thousands to register to vote in the 1960s and 70s. She was also a humanitarian providing food, housing and jobs within the Delta community. The centerpiece of the overall project is a 90-minute documentary, also named Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, where Hamer tells her own story in her own voice through archival footage. The film premiered on PBS and WORLD Channel in February 2022 and is now available on several streaming platforms.
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