Top 5: Brown Girls Doc Mafia
Brown Girls Doc Mafia champions women and non-binary people of color working in the documentary film industry
Brown Girls Doc Mafia is a community of women and non-binary people of color who are passionate about documentary filmmaking. The initiative began five years ago, when founder Iyabo Boyd was visiting Good Pitch New York in October 2015.
During the event, Iyabo was excited to find herself surrounded by so many black female filmmakers (including Tabitha Jackson, N’Jeri Eaton, Sonya Childress, and Rahdi Taylor). Iyabo introduced herself and invited each woman to a meet-up in a nearby bar.
A photo of the group went viral on Facebook, inspiring more filmmakers to band together. Brown Girls Doc Mafia was born and went public at Sundance Film Festival in 2017. It now has over 3300 members who convene online and in-person to provide a nurturing atmosphere where careers can evolve in a safe place.
Brown Girls Doc Mafia’s mission is to bolster the creative and professional success of women and non-binary people of color working in the documentary industry and to challenge the often marginalizing norms of the documentary field. Here we present five BGDM members to add to your ones-to-watch list:
Laura Aguirre
Laura Frances Aguirre is a Mexican-American writer and documentary producer born and raised in LA. She is currently producing a short documentary on LA police unions for the activist organization, The Future Left. Most recently, she produced Brewmance, a feature film about craft beer in America.
Beth Aala
Beth Aala is a Filipina-American documentary filmmaker. She has won three Emmy awards and a Peabody Award for her documentary work at HBO. She recently directed and produced a feature documentary, Made in Boise, which premiered at AFI Docs in June 2019 and was the season opener for PBS' 2019-2020 award-winning Independent Lens series.
Abbesi Akhamie
Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Abbesi Akhamie is a New York-based Nigerian-American writer and director with a keen interest in African storytelling. In 2017, she wrote and directed her debut short film, Still Water Runs Deep, in Nigeria, which premiered at TIFF and won ‘Best Student Film’ at the prestigious Aspen ShortsFest. Her debut feature film, In My Father’s House, is currently in development and will be filmed in Nigeria.
Nandita Ahmed
Born and raised in Dhaka in Bangladesh, Nandita Ahmed is an artist and a filmmaker whose work focuses largely on equality and women’s issues. The first documentary feature she worked on, A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers, focuses on a Bangladeshi all-female formed police unit on a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Last year, for International Women’s Day 2019, Nandita conceived and directed a video, What does a Free Woman look like?, which featured dozens of women speaking over 25 languages from around the globe.
Cecilia Aldarondo
Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director and producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora. Her debut feature, Memories of a Penitent Heart, was selected to World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. Cecilia currently has a documentary in production, in which she circles back to her tortured adolescence, wondering if she remembered it all wrong.
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