In 2009, Claire Andrade-Watkins won an Artist Fellowship in Film & Video by submitting a portion of her film Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican. The documentary is about immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands in the Fox Point neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, whose community was devastated by gentrification in the ’60s and ’70s. It is a fascinating and intensely meaningful story, and Dr. Andrade-Watkins, an Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, Visiting Scholar at Brown University in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and Founder/President of SPIA Media Productions, is an artist MCC is proud to have funded.
Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican was the first in a trilogy of films Dr. Andrade-Watkins is making about the Cape Verdean community in Fox Point. Her second film, Atlantic Portals, is “in the can” (meaning the principal photography is finished), and the filmmaker is using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to raise funds for the film’s post-production.
If you haven’t heard about Kickstarter, it’s a format for creatively organizing microdonations, or donations from many individuals (as opposed to, say, one large funding entity). We’ve written about other projects in the arts that used Kickstarter, such as the DocYard Film Series, the Boston Composers’ Coalition, and the Big Hammock Project.
Learn more about Dr. Andrade-Watkins’ project, as well as fundraising through Kickstarter.
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