Peery Film Festival

This week SID decided to mix things up a little bit.  Venturing outside of our weekly 7:30 meetings in the Kennedy Center, we decided to lend our support to the first annual Peery Film Festival sponsored by Ballard Center for Economic Self Reliance and the Peery Foundation.

This past summer, seven burgeoning BYU filmmakers selected by the Peery Social Entrepreneurship Grant Program were given $2500 grants to create short documentaries about social entrepreneurs throughout the world.  Paired in teams of two with the goal to create something that would be useful to the organization for which they worked, students filmed within the U.S., Paraguay, India and different countries throughout Africa, highlighting the great work of four different social entrepreneurial organizations.

The films were each six minutes in length and beautifully crafted.  Sonidos de la Tierra, a Paraguayan organization that aims to create community and social development through music, was highlighted by Emma Hoskisson and Jenica Heintzelman.  Becky Potter Summers and Dusty Hulet featured Samasource, an organization in India that connects women, youth and refugees to life-changing work through the internet.  Kody Threlfall and Casey Wilson created a film for Global Citizen Year, an organization that sends recent high school graduates to spend a year volunteering in a developing country before starting their college careers.  Finally, Travis and Becky Pitcher showcased Komaza, a non-profit social enterprise that aims to provide sustainable economic opportunities to farmers in Africa by planting and maintaining income-generating tree farms.

After screening the documentaries, film creators answered questions from the audience, underlining the point that although creating the films was a lot of work that the experience was invaluable to each of them.  Following the event campus social venture group representatives were also available to network with while interested students munched on delicious cookies.  

Sound like something you want to do?  The Peery Foundation is now accepting fellowship applicants for Spring/Summer 2011.  Fellows are given $2500 to finance travel and production costs to make a short documentary about a social enterprise.  Todd Mannwaring announced that the Peery Foundation is now opening up the application process to non-film majors as well.  Check out http://peeryfoundation.com/ to learn more about the application process.

See you next time around!
Our new SID Historian,
Rachel Morrison (aka Ama--because there are just too many Rachels out there)