PROVISIONS
Provisions: Impact Filmmaking with Maya Cueva and Leah Galant
PROVISIONS is a series from BAVC Media, featuring interviews, advice, and insights into the creative process from our mediamaking community. The documentary On The Divide tells the stories of three Latinx individuals living in McAllen, Texas. Despite their differing viewpoints, they share an unexpected connection—the last abortion clinic on the U.S./Mexico border. We spoke with directors Maya Cueva and Leah Galant about the process, challenges and rewards of creating a documentary with social impact. You can watch On The Divide here. This interview was conducted in August 2023 and has been edited for length and clarity Documentary has a long [...]
Provisions: DIY Filmmaking with Daniel Freeman
PROVISIONS is a series from BAVC Media, featuring interviews, advice, and insights into the creative process from our mediamaking community. DIY, short for "Do it Yourself," means a few things to Daniel Freeman, an independent filmmaker and experimental music composer. For him, DIY filmmaking is about taking the initiative to create without waiting for external approval, while still embracing a supportive community. We caught up with him about his filmmaking journey and his progression beyond the DIY approach. Daniel was a SFFILM FilmHouse resident in 2019 and 2020. His film Teddy Out of Tune screened at the Mill Valley, Bushwick, [...]
PROVISIONS: Demystifying Film Festival Programming with Celeste Wong
PROVISIONS is a new series from BAVC Media, featuring interviews, advice, and insights into the creative process from our mediamaking community. Submitting your film to a film festival is exciting and a great way to connect your work with audiences, but it can also be incredibly overwhelming. To help demystify what you should consider throughout the process, we reached out to Celeste Wong, a freelance film festival programmer, or according to her, “a professional film fan,” who currently the US Indies programmer for Mill Valley Film Festival and has worked with the Tribeca Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, as [...]
PROVISIONS Filmmaking Foundations: Where to Start with Keith Battle
PROVISIONS is a new series from BAVC Media, featuring interviews, advice, and insights into the creative process from our mediamaking community. Keith Battle is a born storyteller, an educator with over ten years of experience, and BAVC Media’s Director of Advanced Training and Workforce Development. He equips up-and-coming filmmakers with video production skills to get their projects off the ground and tell their stories. We recently caught up with him about what he wished he knew before making his first film, pre-shoot anxiety, over-planning, and if you actually need to level up your gear. This conversation has been edited for [...]
PROVISIONS: Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking with Rodrigo Reyes
PROVISIONS is a new series from BAVC Media, featuring interviews, advice, and insights into the creative process from our mediamaking community. Director Rodrigo Reyes makes films deeply grounded in his identity as an immigrant artist, pushing the boundaries of non-fiction storytelling. His most recent film, Sansón and Me, is a documentary a decade in the making which began when Reyes worked as a court interpreter in rural California for the then 19-year-old undocumented Mexican migrant Sansón Noé Andrade, who was sentenced to two life sentences without parole. Unable to film inside the prison, Sansón’s story is told through reenactments by [...]
