Center for Asian American Media’s Filmmaker Summit

Dear Friends,

I hope this message finds you safe and in good health. We are grieving with our South Asian community as India, Nepal and the Subcontinent continues to experience immense loss due to the resurgence of Covid infections. We are thinking of you.

I invite you to join us at our 2021 Filmmaker Summit: Collaboration Edition, as part of #CAAMFest39!

Nothing will replace the community building and connection that happens at our in-person gatherings, but at this year’s Summit we are honoring our partners and encouraging engagement. We will be hosting all Summit sessions on the Remo platform that is more conducive to smaller group conversations which we hope can lead to future real-world collaborations!

We have lined up three days of panels spanning discussions on what it takes to sustain an independent filmmaking career; investigating the state of public media and how BIPOC filmmakers can lead the path towards greater equity; and wrap with a conversation exploring the complexities of framing work through the lens of Asian American identity.

We start Session 1 with our 2021 CAAM Fellowship cohort on Having One’s Back: Mentorship Within the Documentary Community, delving into the key role mentorship plays in every filmmaker’s career; the second day, we host Firelight Media’s Beyond Resilience: More Than One Lens, bringing together BIPOC filmmakers and public media professionals to strategize a path towards greater representation and equity in public media; and in the third session, we join our friends at the Line of Sight on a panel entitled A Time for Remembering, exploring the work of acclaimed author Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings and how she’s resurrected interest in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.

We are thrilled to bring together our talented 2021 CAAM Fellows and Mentors, our sponsor and collaborator Firelight Media, and an exciting new curated Asian American artist series Line of Sight, a part of the new curatorial group Sentient.Art.Film.

After the presentations, we can take time to decompress or continue the discussions at the happy hours hosted by our partners in the field–Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), Reel South, NOVAC. We will hear from them about collaborations in the community, including the Sauce Fellows from NOVAC and the Hindsightpipeline with Reel South and Firelight.

CAAM is working on improving our accessibility, and this year we are happy to have an ASL interpreter for the Summit presentations. If you need an ASL translator to optimize the Summit experience for you during the table networking, please reach out to our team at events@caamedia.org.

We invite you to hang out with us during the 2021 Filmmaker Summit: Collaboration Edition from wherever you are and take a minute to explore Remo and other ways to engage during CAAMFest.

See you soon!

Sapana

Talent Development & Special Projects Manager
Center for Asian American Media