Los Angeles, CA (December 18, 2014) -- The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) today announced that it will receive $150,000 from the Time Warner Foundation in support of their Latino Lens incubation and short content production program. NALIP’s Latino Lens program is a new NALIP initiative that will incubate and produce a series of Latino filmmakers’ projects & showcase their talents as producers, directors, and writers.  

“We are thrilled to support this important initiative that will serve to elevate Latino storytellers.” Lisa Garcia Quiroz, President, Time Warner Foundation.

Keeping with NALIP’s mission to foster and promote Latino media artists, the Latino Lens program, with a submission call in early 2015, will select 3-5 short feature film scripts from Latino content creators. Each short film will present through a creative approach and independent focus, a storyline of 3-10 minutes long that will be provided pre-production, production, and post-production tools, resources and assets to support the successful completion of each film while later working with them on distribution strategy and outlets.

“We decided that feature filmmakers needed more hands-on and direct production support if they were going develop long term careers in a difficult industry that has had its share of challenges in embracing Latino content or its creators.” said Axel Caballero, Executive Director of NALIP. “We’re thankful to the Time Warner Foundation for their support in a program that will undoubtedly move Latino creators forward.”

This new NALIP incubation and production program initiative comes as a result of needs identified through conversations with members, the 2014 NALIP Media Summit, industry leaders’ perspectives, as well as Latino film scholars surrounding NALIP’s commissioned The Latino Media Gap report this past summer. With Latino Lens, NALIP looks to build on previous residential instruction programs and growing incubation efforts by executing direct short film production in order to address this increasing Latino media gap.

 

About Time Warner Foundation:

The Time Warner Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation that is wholly supported by Time Warner Inc. and its subsidiary companies Home Box Office, Inc., Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.  Its mission is to seek innovative and powerful ways to discover, nurture and celebrate the next generation of storytellers.  Through its New Works/New Voices initiatives, the Foundation strives to build impactful partnerships with best-in-class nonprofit organizations that push the boundaries of artist development and support underrepresented storytellers.  The Foundation's ultimate goal is the cultivation of an artistic community that is rich, vibrant and relevant to audiences of today and tomorrow.

About NALIP:

The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) seeks to inspire, promote, and advocate for Latino content creators in media. As an established non-profit organization, NALIP advances the development of Latino content creation through its programs focusing on narrative, documentary, TV, and digital formats. For more information, please visit www.NALIP.org.

 

Media Contact:

Vanessa Gonzalez, NALIP

Phone: (310) 470-1061

[email protected]

 

DAVID GOLDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Ty Burr - GLOBE STAFF 

Are Sony and America’s multiplex chains doing the right thing by canceling the release of “The Interview” after threats of 9/11-style violence? Or has a truly unfortunate precedent just been set?

On Wednesday, Sony Pictures dropped plans for a Christmas Day release of the film, following a threat by hackers and the decision of the country’s biggest movie theater chains to call off screenings. A spokesman later said that “Sony Pictures has no further release plans for the film.” In the comedy, James Franco and Seth Rogen star as two U.S. journalists sent to assassinate North Korean president Kim Jong-un.

“We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers,” Sony said in a statement. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

On Wednesday evening, news reports emerged that federal investigators have connected the North Korean government to the recent hacking of Sony Pictures’ computers.

We may now never know, but it’s likely that “The Interview” is not a class-A addition to the ranks of world cinema. The film may be as stupidly amusing as Franco and Rogen’s previous collaborations, “Pineapple Express” (2008) and “This Is the End” (2013). It may very well be worse. (An early review in Variety calls it “as funny as a communist food shortage.”) No matter.

By caving in to the threats of a hacker group called Guardians of Peace, reportedly working at the behest of North Korea’s government, Sony and the major exhibition chains have opened the door for any zealot or teenage hacker with mad skills to make all the threats and mayhem they want. This will not be the last such event.

But wait, wasn’t the safety of theatergoers the most important issue once the hackers escalated their tactics to threats of physical violence? Read the most recent missive from Guardians of Peace: “The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.)”

When a bomb threat is phoned into a school, don’t they cancel classes? True enough, and the nation’s major exhibition chains — Regal, AMC, Carmike, Cinemark, and Cineplex — may have felt as though they had no other choice, given that the film’s distributor, Sony, initially left the matter up to them.

But there’s a freedom of expression aspect to this situation, in that the hacker group has now successfully shut down moviegoers’ ability to choose whether or not to see the film for themselves. Rogen, Franco, and Sony have the right to make as lame and inadvisable a movie as they want; it should still be allowed to be seen. The standard litmus test of unacceptable speech is the cliché of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater. “The Interview” isn’t doing that. The hackers are — almost literally.

Hollywood was already rattled before the threats. Since Nov. 24, seven data dumps of Sony documents have been released to the public, detailing personal employee information (Social Security numbers, salaries) as well as the often fractious inner workings of studio executives’ communications and decision making. Several of Sony’s in-the-pipeline films, including the new “Annie,” were also made public, and copies quickly multiplied on file-sharing sites. An eighth “Christmas present” has been promised along with the aforementioned threats to theaters.

The press has had a field day with these documents, and the discussions of whether to publish them has been loud, impassioned, and actually quite useful. These are the growing pains of the media moonscape in which we now live. On the other hand, much of the reporting on catty e-mails from and to Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal has been schadenfreude masquerading as journalism. Executives in the film industry trash-talk one another and the talent and make stupid racial jokes — this is news? Somewhere in the Hollywood afterlife, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and all four of the Warner brothers are rolling their eyes at our collective naivete.

Other conversations spiraling off the hack: Who green-lighted “The Interview” in the first place? What studio suit thought it was a smart idea to make a film about killing the leader of the most hostile, paranoid country on the planet, one that happens to have nuclear capability? The existence of this movie says much about the entitled “audacity” of comic creators slapping one another on the back as they seek new taboos to break. (And I say that as a fan of Rogen and — every so often — Franco.)

Some of the public discussion has broken down on expected partisan lines. Those on the left have said, well, we might feel equally chuffed if the North Koreans had made a movie about assassinating Barack Obama. Those on the right respond, Where were you when “Death of a President” came out in 2006? That independent British film, which envisioned the assassination of then-President George W. Bush, caused a furor, primarily among those who didn’t see it. The title event happens mostly offscreen early on and is used as a pretext to imagine an ensuing government crackdown. It’s not a very good film, but it’s earnestly intended and less exploitive than its unfortunate title. And, unlike “The Interview,” it doesn’t feature a comic scene of Kim Jong-un’s head exploding in flaming chunks of hair and skin.

All right, maybe the world won’t miss this movie. but that’s not the point. (More likely, anyone who really wants to see it eventually will, since you can bet that pirated copies will turn up in the usual dark alleys of the Web.) With the announcement that “The Interview” would not be released in any form at any date — not even in secondary markets like streaming video or on DVD — Sony and the entertainment industry have capitulated completely to an invisible enemy with no proven ability to strike violently in America.

But who wants to call that bluff? Not entertainment corporations with customers to protect — and images, profits, and international distribution agreements. (Not to mention a parent company in Japan, a country that has a long history of tensions with North Korea.) In the grand Hollywood tradition, a studio has censored itself before someone else could do it for them. In the process, it has opened the door to anyone who wants to watch a big corporation wriggle on a hook and — unlike most of us — has the skill set to make it happen. And it has lost the first battle in what may yet become a whole new kind of war.

Check this out at the BostonGlobe.com

Ty Burr can be reached at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.

NALIP Member William Caballero

For those would-be directors born in Latin America finding funding for a new production involves applying for dozens of grants provided by their country’s film institute or local government money earmarked for the arts. There’s also European organizations that target filmmakers in the “developing world” and Ibermedia, a consortium of film institutes that support co-productions amongst Ibero-American countries with Spain and Portugal. These funders are rarely concerned with a film’s commercial appeal and let the director pursue their vision, no matter how wonderfully weird it may be. This new capital-raising system is a result of policy changes that began in the 90s and has served as an impetus for the filmmaking boom that most Latin American countries are experiencing. In stark contrast, for American-born Latinos raising money to make a film is fraught with difficulty.

In most cases, having American citizenship is an advantage, but for Latino filmmakers it adds a host of obstacles. Unless you happen to have a passport from the country your parents hail from, the children of Latino immigrants are left out in the cold — they are not eligible for Ibermedia grants or those for directors from developing countries. Then, there is the fact that the United States has no film institute to speak of. There are a few non-profits (including PBS) that provide money for documentaries (they usually need to social-issue based movies) but there is no U.S. equivalent to the public grants that Latin American cineastas have access to. That leaves them to fight over scraps in the private sector. Have you ever tried to convince an investor to give you money for a Latino story featuring an all-Latino cast? Try it out and tell me how that works for you. (Spoiler alert: It’s virtually impossible.)

It’s no surprise that Latin American film directors are circling the globe, showing their finished films at the top-tier film festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, and Venice. When was the last time you heard of a U.S. Latino filmmaker doing the same? I’m not going to say never, but it’s been a really, really long time. Despite all the obstacles, there are lots of U.S. Latino filmmakers who are forging a new path, making movies without waiting for someone to give them money or for the industry’s OK to proceed. Here we celebrate 10 Latino directors whose films may have played a big prestigious festival, or won a ton of awards, or got rave reviews, or was broadcast on television this year (or all of the above.) It’s our own version of the American (Latino) Dream.

Check out this film list at Remezcla.com.

Vicente A./Flickr

By Dennis Romero @ LA Weekly

Post-recession America has seen some pretty ugly divides between rich and poor, minorities and whites.

Los Angeles just might be the epicenter of the disparities. It is, after all, a place where hungry immigrants come to make illicit, under-the-table wages while the prices of some estates in the hills above the Westside have been reaching for the $100 million mark.

This week the Measure of America initiative of the Social Science Research Council published a report called A Portrait of California 2014-15. It's not pretty, especially when it comes to some of the findings about our favorite city.

In a town where most of the highly paid entertainment positions go to white men(and yet we still turned around and gave the industry nearly $1.6 billion of our tax dollars), it's probably not surprising to learn that white folks make a median wage that's twice that of L.A.'s largest ethnic group, Latinos, according to the report.

(Yeah, Chris Rock had a point).

The median income for L.A.'s Latinos is $21,314, while for whites it's $44,929. African Americans are said to make $31,603. The U.S. Census says the median individual (per capita) income in L.A. County is $27,900 a year.

What researchers call the East Adams-Exposition Park area saw the lowest median income, about $15,000, recorded in the entire state, according to the report. The Silicon Valley area saw the highest: $73,000.

Measure of America:

The level of income inequality in Los Angeles is the highest of all the California metro areas. Extreme income inequality and family stress have been linked to poor physical and emotional health. Taken together, these indicators suggest that too many children and youth in Los Angeles face serious challenges to their well-being. 

The heart of this analysis is about the "well being" of Californians via what researchers call their Human Development Index, which is calculated based on measures of health, education and earnings.

South Los Angeles and Watts together scored the lowest on the index for the Golden State.

Comparing that area with some of the highest-income, highest-scoring communities in greater L.A. produced "the largest gap in human development scores," the report found.

" ... The highest neighborhood Index score, in Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa Beach Cities, is four times that of the lowest, in South Central LA and Watts," the report reads.

Report co-author Kristen Lewis told us:

The interesting thing about L.A. is that there are some neighborhoods that have some of the highest scores in the country, and others have some of the lowest scores. What you're seeing in L.A. is a real story of extremes. The inequality goes beyond income.

Measure of America

One example: Asian American babies born today in greater Los Angeles can expect to outlive African American babies by more than 11 years, the report found.

In fact, Asian Americans scored highest on the well-being index for L.A., while Latinos scored lowest. African Americans scored second-lowest.

Sarah Burd-Sharps, co-author of the report:

 ... It's concerning to uncover that there are in fact five Californias – five starkly different levels of well-being that Californians are experiencing, ranging from the thriving one-percent to the struggling and disenfranchised, who comprise nearly half of the population.

Overall, L.A. ranked sixth out of California's top 10 most-populous cities when it comes to well-being, the researchers found.

Indeed, it's not all bad news. Life in Los Angeles improved during the Great Recession, a rarity, the Measure America folks concluded. 

During that time, residents "gained almost a year and a half of life expectancy, and the proportion of the adult population with bachelor’s degrees or higher increased," the report found.

"That's good news," said co-author Lewis. "There's no magic bullet here. But if there is one, we would say education is the key to better outcomes across the board."

Send feedback and tips to the author. Follow Dennis Romero on Twitter at @dennisjromero. Follow L.A. Weekly News on Twitter at @laweeklynews.