Grants & Awards

About the Film:

When forced to choose between the fragile cohesion of her middle-class family and loyalty to her best friend, a Bronx teenager juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.

About the Filmmakers:

Award-winning writer/director Dee Rees is a recent alumna of New York University’s graduate film program and a 2007 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow. She has written and directed several short films, including Pariah, which has screened at over 40+ festivals including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and garnered several accolades including the Audience Award at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival. Most recently, Dee continued development on the feature project Pariah at the 2008 Sundance Screenwriting & Director’s Labs and was named as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” for 2008. Dee was also selected as a 2008 Tribeca Institute/ Renew Media Arts Fellow (Rockefeller Foundation) for her work, and is currently wrapping post-production on a feature documentary on Liberia titled Eventual Salvation, which was honored with a grant from the 2007 Sundance Documentary Fund in addition to winning the 2007 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award. Dee worked as a script supervision intern on Spike Lee’s films When The Levees Broke and Inside Man and also worked as a development intern with producer Barbara De Fina. Dee earned a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from Florida A&M University and slaved away at three different, successively more soul-crushing FORTUNE 500 companies in a far, far distant former life. Nekisa Cooper, an accomplished marketer and emerging producing talent has produced short films, including the award-winning short Pariah, which has had over 40 screenings, including at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won over 25 film festival awards. Most recently, Nekisa was selected as one the producers to represent IFP at the 2009 Rotterdam Producing Lab and she was also named a member of the Film Independent Project Involve Class of 2009. In July 2008, she was also selected to participate in the inaugural and highly competitive Sundance Institute Creative Producing Initiative. In 2005, she produced the short, Orange Bow, which screened at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on BET-Jazz. Nekisa is also partnered with award-winning writer/director, Dee Rees, in producing the Sundance Documentary Fund-supported feature Eventual Salvation, which she represented at the 2007 Sundance Institute’s Producer’s Conference. Prior to film, Nekisa had a successful marketing career working in brand management for such companies as General Electric, L’Oreal and Colgate-Palmolive. She also coached women’s basketball at the Division I, Division III and high school levels. Nekisa earned a BA in Government with a minor in Japanese studies from The College of William & Mary and an MBA in Marketing from Clark Atlanta University.