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2025 Works-in-Progress Lab Recipients

April 30, 2025 BY Amalia Renteria

The Cucalorus Works-in-Progress (WiP) Lab supports social justice documentaries with a focus on Black storytelling. Co-designed and coordinated by Working Films, participating artists will receive feedback on their work-in-progress and explore audience engagement strategies through workshops, consultations, and community screenings during a residency at Cucalorus’ campus from April 22-29, 2025. Now in its 17th year, the Works-in-Progress Lab was launched in 2008 through a partnership between Working Films and Cucalorus.

The following documentary films were selected for the Cucalorus 2025 Works-in-Progress Lab:

Of the Soil by Alexis Bell

While America’s food system threatens the health of the planet and its people, local farmers network to create sustainable pathways to food sovereignty for their communities.
Alexis Bell is a film director, producer, and an award-winning journalist from Newport News, Virginia. She makes it her mission to elevate voices and narratives seldom listened to or historically overlooked. Common threads of discrimination, injustice, and inequity repeatedly showed themselves to be the backdrop of stories she covered as a journalist. Now, Alexis uses film to drive impact, imagine different worlds, and create social change. Through her work, she curates a constructive and empowering ambience. Alexis is the impact producer for Freedom Hill, an award-winning documentary exploring environmental racism in Eastern North Carolina; and the production coordinator on the Sundance supported documentary, Basketball Heaven directed by Resita Cox.

 

Allensworth: The Town That Refuses to Die by Daryl B. Jones

Rural Black and Latine residents confront systemic racism and a worsening environmental crisis in their century-long fight for prosperity, revealing a legacy of resistance that drives the community forward.
Daryl B. Jones is a documentary filmmaker and instructor. Daryl’s previous films include Tender, a short documentary about Black trans women managing the housing crisis in San Francisco. He also wrote, “Know Your Ethical Guidelines for Documentary Filmmaking,” and “Neither Diminished or Forgotten” for New Day Films. His oral history project, “The New Roxy Theater,” is archived at Jackson State University. He holds an MFA in social documentation from UC Santa Cruz.

 

Women Who Ride by Jessica Jones

Tish Edwards, founder of Oakland’s first Black women’s motorcycle club D’Vious Wayz, balances caring for her disabled son while keeping the sisterhood alive.
Jessica Jones is an Emmy® (CA-regional) nominated documentary filmmaker and editor. Her work often focuses on community, representation, and racial equity through character-driven narratives. She has edited content that has appeared on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, PBS, The New York Times and the BBC. In 2021, she completed the short film ON THE PULSE OF LIFE, which screened at the Smithsonian FUTURES exhibit and at numerous festivals nationwide. She was the 2011 George Stoney Fellow at Working Films, a 2013 BAVC Mediamaker Fellow, and a 2023-24 Sundance Documentary Contributing Editor Fellow. Currently, she is an SFFILM House and Wexner Center for the Arts resident. She is directing/editing the upcoming short documentary WOMEN WHO RIDE, and editing the feature documentary COACH EMILY.

 

 

The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller by Paulina Davis

A New Yorker explores her family’s roots in NYC’s first non-segregated housing cooperative, finding an old solution to the current housing crisis, and examining her own homeownership dream.

Paulina Davis is making her directorial debut with the documentary “The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller.”  The in-production film is a 2024 DocPitch Audience Award winner (California Film Institute) and received a 2024 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts through its fiscal sponsor, New York Women in Film and Television. Paulina is a 2022-24 Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow. When she’s not working on her film, Paulina works in higher education. Paulinaholds a juris doctor cum laude from Howard University School of Law and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Delaware. She is currently living, playing, and working in her hometown of New York City.

 

 

AFROMYSTIC by Seyi Adebanjo

AFROMYSTIC is a lyrical documentary that follows LGBTQ+ Yorùbá practitioners across the waters of Nigeria, Brazil, and the US in a quest for post-colonial liberation–through reclaiming/restoring the preeminence of indigenous religion.

Seyi Adebanjo, MFA, is a Queer Gender-Non-Conforming Nigerian artist who raises awareness around social issues through video. Seyi’s work exists at the intersection of art, imagination, ritual, and politics. Seyi is a 2024 Sundance Documentary Film Fund Awardee, a 2023 Sundance Institute Trans Possibilities Intensive Fellow and serves on the faculty of New York University. Seyi has received a Fatales Forward: Trans Stories Fellowship, an NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, and residency with The Laundromat Project. Seyi is a 2022 Semi-Finalist for the Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship. Seyi’s award winning documentaries “Justice for Islan Nettles” has screened on PBS Channel 13, and “Ọya: Something Happened On The Way To West Africa” continues to screen globally.

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