Student Movie Premiere Set For Friday
The public is invited to celebrate the work of the Sunflower County Film Academy Students
CLEVELAND, MS – June 15, 2025 - For the last three weeks, 17 students from the Mississippi Delta have been learning a new skill – how to make their own films - by way of a three-week Digital Arts and Media workshop held at the Delta Arts Alliance.
On Friday, June 20, the community is invited to attend their movie premiere at the historic Ellis Theatre in downtown Cleveland. The free event will begin at 11 a.m. followed by a meet-and-greet with the students and a luncheon catered by Backdraft Restaurant at 12 p.m.
The workshop, the Sunflower County Film Academy (SCFA), is a free STEM program for Delta high school students and is part of the K-12 educational curriculum, Find Your Voice, for the award-winning film, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America.
A Sunflower County native, Fannie Lou Hamer was a voting and equal rights advocate and humanitarian. She was a proponent of education and brought the first Head Start program to Mississippi in the late 1960s. Hamer died on March 14, 1977. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former president Joe Biden in January 2025.
Founded in 2018, the purpose of the SCFA is to offer Delta high school students broader career options after graduation. The film camp began on June 2 and was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and ATMOS Energy.
SCFA Students AJ Johnson, Merion Turner, Nick Ales, Darren Chau and Mandy Ann Metcalf (seated) filming a scene for one of their movies. Photo by Glenn Payne.
Instructors for the film camp have been teachers of Media Techniques and Single Cam Video Production and professional filmmakers. Since 2023, Glenn Payne of Dead Leaf Productions and Ben Powell of Broken Arm Studio have worked with students to produce a class film using professional grade production equipment. This year, they were joined by a third instructor|filmmaker Laeitta Wade Robinson of Eittabug Productions. Robinson teaches video production at Greenville High School.
“I wish, wish, wish I had the opportunity to take a film workshop like this when I was young,” Payne said. “I didn’t get started until I was about 23. And I am just so excited to work with the kids.”
The students who created several short films this year, rather than one class film are from Cleveland, Moorhead, Greenville, Edwards, Shaw, Renova, Doddsville and Drew.
“This was a very enthusiastic bunch,” Powell said. "The students have taken [the camp] seriously and have been very engaged. There aren’t a lot of film things going on here in Cleveland. And I’m happy to be inspiring the kids.”
Sunflower County Film Academy student films have been featured at local and national film festivals, won film awards and were broadcast on a nationally syndicated television series.