Grantee

As Outfest prepares to launch its 41st edition on July 13, over two hundred filmmakers anxiously await to see how the Los Angeles crowds will respond to the dramas, comedies, shorts and documentaries programmed for the film festival that will be covering all aspects of the LGBTQ+ community. With a mission statement that proclaims an agenda to “give artists, filmmakers and entertainment professionals the opportunity to discover their voice, provide the pathways to the visibility of their work by all members of the public, and assure that their legacy will live on for generations to come,” Outfest is excited about its latest edition.

Angela Lee is the Director of Artist Development at Film Independent, a non-profit that aims to foster inclusion and innovation in the world of visual storytelling. Lee not only is a successful producer in her own right, but she also leads some of the most forward and relevant fiction and non-fiction storytelling labs and programs in the USA.

“Diversity can mean more than one thing. Diversity can be an injury, diversity can be the color of your skin, diversity can mean standing up for yourself,” actress and activist Sharon Stone said at The Hollywood Reporter’s second annual “Raising Our Voices: Setting Hollywood’s Inclusion Agenda” luncheon gala which was held in partnership with the Golden Globes, East West Bank and the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, the event’s venue.

FilmAid’s Director Gita Saedi Kiely embodies the organization’s mission to give a public voice to vulnerable communities around the world through the power of film, and to “democratize who gets to tell their story”. She grew up in Chicago in a small Persian-American community with parents from Teheran who met in the USA as university students in the 1960s.

Voodoo Macbeth marks the first theatrical release from USC Originals in association with Warner Bros and was overseen by veteran producer and USC professor, John Watson (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Backdraft and The Outer Limits). The film was made almost entirely by past and present students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts – a long-time HFPA grant recipient – and is based on the true story behind the 1936 all-black Shakespeare production of Voodoo Macbeth.

Over the last 27 years the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has donated $50 million to a wide variety of entertainment-related nonprofit organizations, film restorations, and academic programs. More than 2,220 students have received scholarships to help them pursue their dreams.

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Kids in the Spotlight (KITS) provides screenwriting and film production courses to young adults in Los Angeles’ foster care system. The founder, Tige Charity, stands behind this courageous effort to give underprivileged youths a creative outlet, which sometimes turns out to be life-changing.

The Urban Peace Institute recently awarded completion certificates to this year’s class of graduates from its community leadership programs. In a remote event billed as the Leadership Institute Celebration, certificates were awarded to those who completed Institute workshops in the “emerging”, advanced” and “congress” levels.

Doing the Work is a series profiling key recipients of HFPA Philanthropy Margaret Wu was happy to see the sycamore trees. Not in-person, but represented in their true glory on-screen through The Newcomer, a ten-minute short film that follows a Canadian expatriate who begins to acclimate to the streets of Shanghai.