NYWIFT Industry Screening: The Body Politic

NYWIFT is proud to present an Industry Screening of The Body Politic at DCTV, co-presented by our partners at POV and Black Public Media. 

This NY Premiere Screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and subjects, moderated by NYWIFT Board President and BPM Executive Director Leslie Fields-Cruz, as well as a reception. 

Date: Friday, September 27, 2024
Time: 8 PM
Location: DCTV Firehouse – 87 Lafayette Street, NYC 10013
Cost: $16

Buy tickets

About the Film

Still courtesy of POV

The Body Politic

Directed by Gabriel Francis and Paz Goodenough
Produced by Gabriel Francis, Paz Goodenough, Dawne Langford, John Benam
2023  87 min  U.S.  English

Like many areas in the United States, the City of Baltimore has been plagued by gun violence. Amid the George Floyd uprising, Brandon Scott, a young reform-minded leader, is elected mayor. His hope is to lower violence in the city with a new public health-focused approach rather than relying only on policing as he feels others have done.

With unfettered access, cameras follow him and his team of young leaders throughout their first year in city hall, unveiling an ambitious plan to lower the city’s murder rate. When opposition mounts, his commitment to his principles puts his political future in jeopardy. Will his holistic approach lead to healing and serve as a blueprint for the rest of the nation?

Panelists

Image courtesy of POV

Brandon M. Scott is the 52nd Mayor of Baltimore, working to end gun violence, restore the public’s trust in government and change Baltimore for the better. Scott was unanimously elected President of the Baltimore City Council by his colleagues in May 2019. As Council President, Scott developed and released the first-ever City Council President legislative agenda, focused on building safer, stronger communities, cleaning up city government, investing in Baltimore’s young people, and centering equity. Previously, Scott served on the City Council representing Baltimore’s 2nd District. He was first elected in 2011 at the age of 27 and is one of the youngest people ever elected to the Baltimore City Council.

During his first term, Scott emerged as a leading voice in reducing violence in Baltimore and reinstated Council Oversight of the Baltimore Police Department by holding quarterly hearings. He believes that reducing violence will require a holistic, all-hands-on-deck approach, one that recognizes violence is fundamentally a public health issue. Scott led legislative initiatives that created extensive crime data sharing and online reporting of crimes by the Baltimore Police Department. In 2016, Scott introduced and passed legislation creating an open data policy in Baltimore.

In early 2018, then-Councilman Scott introduced and passed monumental legislation on equity in Baltimore. His equity assessment program law will require all city agencies to operate through a lens of equity and require all operating budgets, capital budgets, and proposed legislation to be weighed through an equity lens. That legislation is in the early stages of implementation. Mayor Scott is a rising star in politics. He was a member of the Young Elected Officials Network and served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for YEO’s America’s Cabinet. He also served as the Chair of the National League of Cities’ Large Cities Council.

Erricka Bridgeford is a peace activist from Baltimore City and a close friend of Brandon Scott. She is the co-founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365 (now called: The Baltimore Peace Movement), which co-organizes quarterly peace weekends in the city. The movement began in 2017 and rallies Baltimoreans to avoid violence and creates opportunities for people to “notice, uplift, nurture, share, and bask in the peace that already exists within them.” Erricka also trains mediators and teaches conflict resolution skills. Erricka’s life was first impacted by murder when she was 12 years old, and she has been working for over twenty years to “ensure that murder does not have the last say.” Erricka’s ability to grow and nurture peace is fueled by her commitment to transform her personal pain into “hope in action.” 

As Site Director of the Baltimore Safe Streets, Belair-Edison location, Dante Johnson works with community members on violence initiatives. The Belair-Edison site is located in the same neighborhood where Dante also lives. Born and raised in Baltimore, Dante faced numerous challenges throughout his life, including struggles with addiction and periods of incarceration. He now uses his life experiences to help save lives in his community. Belair-Edison has long struggled with deadly gun violence. In 2021, the Safe Streets site, under Dante’s leadership, celebrated a year without a homicide. Dante’s achievements and dedication to community safety earned him recognition as a guest of US President Joe Biden at the signing of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Dante is now the Director of Community Safety Initiatives at the Baltimore-based NGO Living Classrooms Foundation, where he works to help heal neighborhoods throughout the city.

Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough (Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Sound) is a proud third-generation resident of Baltimore, Maryland. He began his career as a production assistant on the TV series Homicide: Life on the Streets, later becoming a camera assistant on projects such as A Beautiful Mind, The Sopranos, and Oz. He served as a camera operator on the Steven Soderbergh-produced and George Clooney-directed HBO series Unscripted and has been a cinematographer on documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and HBO. In 2017, he co-produced the Mexican/United States co-production of the feature documentary Agave: The Spirit of a Nation (SXSW, 2018). From 2018-19, he worked in the Philippines photographing and co-producing Ramona Diaz’s Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning documentary A Thousand Cuts (Sundance, 2020) about Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa. After returning from the Philippines, Gabriel was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Treatment for the disease has left him disabled and without full mobility in his right leg. Physically unable to return to his previous career as a full-time vérité cameraperson, he has kept his passion for documentaries alive by shifting his focus to directing. The Body Politic represents his first time as a feature documentary director. Gabriel is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and a 2018 Katherine Davis Fellow For Peace. He speaks Spanish and has worked on several projects in Latin America.

Filmmaker Dawne Langford (Producer) is a 2023 Sundance Women to Watch Adobe x Fellow and a 2022-23 Sundance Producers Lab Fellow. After years of working as a broadcast television editor, she expanded her role after her acceptance to the PBS Producers Academy in 2013. She shifted her focus to producing independent feature documentaries Check It, Kandahar Journals, and Finding Joseph I. Dawne collaborated on projects for CNN Films, CGTN, Discovery Channel, and Moxie Pictures in N.Y.C. with director Lee Hirsch. Currently she is producing The Body Politic with director/producer Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough, and is in late post production on the documentary Who Killed Alex Odeh?, with directors Jason Osder and William Youmans. She’s also in production on You Don’t Know My Name with director Tommy Franklin. Her motivation and primary interest is amplifying traditionally suppressed narratives and presentations of historical events to deepen understanding, support learning, and stimulate community dialogue.

Two-time Emmy® Award winner John Benam (Producer, Cinematographer, Sound) is a Baltimore-based filmmaker and cinematographer. He has over two decades of experience producing, directing, and shooting a wide variety of programming for an array of networks and collaborators. His latest documentary project Assassins had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. His passion for social justice is evident in his critically-acclaimed film Charm City which revealed the complex world of community-police relations. That same year at Sundance, This is Home chronicled the plight of a Syrian refugee family as they navigated a new life in the United States. As Director of Photography on Netflix’s 2017 Emmy®-nominated series The Keepers, John created an authentic connection with the courageous survivors of abuse who trusted him to help bring their truth to the screen.

NYWIFT Board President Leslie Fields-Cruz (Moderator) started at Black Public Media, formerly National Black Programming Consortium, in 2001 managing grant making activities that supported the production and development of documentary programs for PBS. By 2005, she was the Director of Programming, leading the distribution of all funded programs to public television. In 2008, with six independent titles in need of a public television broadcast, Fields-Cruz launched AfroPoP: The Ultimately Cultural Exchange, a documentary series highlighting the variety and depth of the global black experience. AfroPoP has garnered several awards and is the only national public television series focused solely on stories from the black experience. In the fall of 2014, Fields-Cruz became BPM’s third Executive Director. Though she keeps the pulse on the development of program content and its distribution across public media platforms, she is focused on growing BPM’s resources to enable it to support more stories about the Black experience.