Member Screening Series – This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer and Thunder in Guyana

Member Screening Series – This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fanie Lou Hamer and Thunder in Guyana

Join us for this month’s NYWIFT Member Screening Series showcasing the films This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer by Robin N. Hamilton (Director) and Stefanie Dworkin(Preliminary Editor); and Thunder in Guyana by Suzanne Wasserman (Director/Producer), Deborah Shaffer (Executive Producer) and Amanda Zinoman (Editor/Co-Writer). The filmmakers will be available for a Q&A immediately following the screening.

The series provides members with the opportunity to show their work in a theatrical setting. Screenings take place at Anthology Film Archives, followed by networking at a nearby bar.

This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer
Robin N. Hamilton (Director)
Stefanie Dworkin (Preliminary Editor)
2015, 26min

When a poor Mississippi sharecropper fights the crushing abuse of the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement finds an unlikely heroine. This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer follows one woman’s journey from beaten field-hand to political powerhouse – and along the way proves every voice matters.

Robin N. Hamilton is an Emmy-award winning journalist and filmmaker whose work has taken her all over the country, as well as around the world. She was drawn into journalism while in college at Duke University, when she was writing her senior paper about the desegregation of Durham. During that time, she learned of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer in a course about women in the Civil Rights Movement. However, she had not yet realized she would do a film about Mrs. Hamer. Instead, after graduation she pursued a career as a television journalist, working for network affiliates around the country, including Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. While in Washington at the Tribune television affiliate, she hosted several award-winning documentaries about black history in the nation’s capital. This is her directorial debut.

Stefanie Dworkin is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker/editor, photographer, and educator. Recent credits include: WNET’s Treasures of New York: The Flatiron Building, (Dir: Charles Hobson) and This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer (Dir: Robin N. Hamilton). Her photographs are in private collections and have been included in numerous juried shows and publications, including The Center for Fine Art Photography’s recent Illuminate exhibition and PDN’s Photobook NYC, both juried by Elizabeth Avedon. Dworkin also teaches video editing and mobile video production at the International Center for Photography and to groups and individuals.

Thunder in Guyana
Suzanne Wasserman (Director/Producer)
Deborah Shaffer (Executive Producer)
Amanda Zinoman (Editor/Co-Writer)
2003, 50min

Filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman grew up fascinated by her glamorous cousin Janet. At 23, Janet Rosenberg, a beautiful nursing student born and raised in Chicago, fell in love with a handsome dental student from a country no one in her family had even heard of. Together, the political power couple became known as the founders of modern Guyana, and in 1997, Janet became the first American-born woman to lead a nation. In Thunder in Guyana, Wasserman uses interviews, family photos and archival footage to tell the story of her remarkable cousin: a tale of life-long love, political campaigns and struggles to bring progressive policies to an adopted country.

Suzanne Wasserman is an historian and award-winning filmmaker. She has published on topics such as the Great Depression, Jewish nostalgia, housing, restaurant culture, tourism, pushcart peddling, the Jewish silent screen actress Theda Bara, 19th century saloons, and 21st century street fairs. She is the co-author of Life on the Lower East Side, 1937-1950: The Photographs of Rebecca Lepkoff, and was an adviser for Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man. Thunder in Guyana aired nationally on PBS on Independent Lens, and won Best Documentary at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and a Cine Golden Eagle. Wasserman’s work has received grants from the director John Sayles, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Women in Film and Television, and others. Her second film, a short documentary entitled Brooklyn among the Ruins,premiered at the Coney Island Film Festival in 2005 and was broadcast on PBS/WNET’s series Reel New York in 2006. Her third film, Sweatshop Cinderella (2010), is about the immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska. Her most recent documentary, Meat Hooked!, is about the rise and fall (and return) of butchering in NYC.

Deborah Shaffer is an Academy Award winning filmmaker. She began making social issue documentaries with the Newsreel collective. She co-founded Pandora Films, one of the first woman’s film companies. Her feature documentary, The Wobblies, premiered at the New York Film Festival. During the 80’s Shaffer focused on human rights in Central and Latin America, in films including Witness to War: DR. Charlie Clements (Academy Award 1985), and Fire from the Mountainand Dance of Hope (Sundance). Shaffer directed one of the first post-9/11 films, From the Ashes: 10 Artists followed by From the Ashes: Epilogue (Sundance, Tribeca). She is Executive Producer of the Oscar-nominated short Asylum, and directed numerous public television programs on women in science and the arts. She co-directed and co-produced To Be Heard and recently EP’d Very Semi Serious nominated for 2 Emmys. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Shaffer is currently in production on a short about artist Audrey Flack.

Amanda Zinoman has been working as an editor, producer and director in film and television for over 25 years. Her work has screened on PBS, ABC, HBO, Discovery and at festivals and on screens around the world. Her films include Sholem Aleichem, Laughing in the Darkness (Theatrical Release), Thunder in Guyana (Independent Lens/PBS), Drinking Apart (HBO), Frontline: The Lost Children of Rockdale County (PBS) and The Shvitz (Theatrical Release/PBS). Zinoman was on staff at Bill Moyers’ NOW and has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy for her editing. Two of her projects have won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award.