S.W.A.N. (Support Women Artists Now) Day Screening and Reception: BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez

 Join NYWIFT, SAG-AFTRA, School of Visual Arts Film department, African-American Women in Cinema, Women in the Arts & Media 

Coalition, Women Make Movies, and HerFlix at the SVA Theatre on March 26th for a screening of BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez in recognition of S.W.A.N. (Support Women Artists Now) Day, an annual event on the last Saturday of March that celebrates women artists. This screening is the closing event of the 18th African-American Women in Cinema (AAWIC) Festival. There will be a Q&A and reception following the screening.

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez 
2015, 91 mins.
Produced and Directed by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez offers unprecedented access to the life, work and mesmerizing performances of renowned poet and activist Sonia Sanchez who describes herself as “a woman with razor blades between my teeth.” A leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and inspiration to today’s hip hop spoken word artists, Sanchez for over 60 years has helped to redefine American culture and politics as an activist in the Black, women’s and peace movements.

Maya Angelou called Sanchez “a lion in literature’s forest” while spoken word artist Bryonn Bain credits her with paving the way for his generation, “She not only opened the door, she blew off the roof.” Sanchez revolutionized poetry by incorporating street language, a unique performance style and collaborations with jazz musicians.

Sanchez’s contemporaries Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, John Bracey, Jr., Haki Madhubuti and Nikki Giovanni joined by such newer voices as Talib Kweli, Ayana Mathis, jessica Care moore, Bryonn Bain and Questlove present impassioned readings of and insightful commentary on her fearless verse, including her raw love poems. 
View the Trailer

About the Filmmakers 

Barbra Attie and Janet Goldwater have been making award-winning broadcast documentaries for more than 25 years. They are recipients of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Sabrina Schmidt Gordon has been editing and producing high impact documentaries for more than 15 years.

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez is the second documentary produced by Attie, Goldwater and Gordon. Their previous collaboration, Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter (2009), recounts a Malian mother’s fight for asylum in the U.S. to protect her two-year old daughter from female genital cutting/mutilation. Supported by ITVS and the Sundance Documentary Fund, Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter was broadcast nationally on public television’s Afropop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange series in 2011. It has been shown at film festivals throughout the world, including the Human Rights Watch Festival and Silverdocs, and was named Best Social Documentary at the Addis International Film Festival in Ethiopia.

Attie and Goldwater’s documentaries often focus on social justice issues affecting women and girls — reproductive rights, violence against women, female genital mutilation — but they also make films about women who have inspired them as artists and activists. In 2003, Maggie Growls, the biography of the founder of the Gray Panthers, Maggie Kuhn, was the premiere broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens. Landowska: Uncommon Visionary, nationally broadcast on PBS in 1999, explored the accomplishments of the pioneering harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska.

Gordon makes documentary films that explore social justice issues, the arts and politics. She produced and edited the acclaimed documentaries Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, about manhood and gender politics in Hip-Hop, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on Independent Lens, and Documented, the story of Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant and today fights for immigration reform. She is also a contributing editor on The New Black (Dir: Yoruba Richen), and Wilhemina’s War (Dir: June Cross). She is Co-Chair of the Black Documentary Collective.

Michelle Materre’s (Moderator) career spans more than twenty-five years as a film producer, writer, arts administrator, distribution and marketing specialist, film programmer and college professor. Her critically acclaimed film series, Creatively Speaking, has been a forum for presenting works by and about women and people of color for twenty years. In February 2015, Creatively Speaking co-presented the unprecedented film series Tell It Like it Is: Black Independents in NYC 1968-1986, with Jake Perlin and The Film Society of Lincoln Center and received the prestigious Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics. She produces and hosts the weekly radio show, Creatively Speaking on the Air on the Black Whole Radio network. Materre is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film at The New School, and is also an independent media consultant, advising filmmakers and organizations on fundraising, distribution, marketing, and exhibition strategies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Women Make Movies; former member of the Board of Directors of New York Women in Film and Television; a recipient of The Pen and Brush Society, Accomplished Women in the Arts Award; as well as a featured artist in the much-acclaimed annual journal documenting contemporary artists, Artist and Influence.

The screening is co-presented by the School of Visual Arts and SAG-AFTRA.
SAG-AFTRA is a sponsor of the reception.
Special thanks to Reeves Lehman and Adam Natale.