Sundance Institute, Gold House Launch Multicultural Filmmakers Fund

As more and more cultural affinity groups plant their flags at Sundance each year, Gold House has united a handful of organizations, in partnership with the Sundance Institute, for a shared mission: to tangibly support filmmakers from historically excluded backgrounds.

The Sundance Institute | One House Filmmakers Fund provides $10,000 in unrestricted financing as well as mentorship, training and programmatic promotion. The filmmakers were chosen by a selection committee comprised of Gold House, Sundance Institute, the East West Bank Foundation (which is providing the monetary support) as well as executives from GLAAD, the NAACP Hollywood Bureau, Latinx House and RespectAbility.

“The East West Bank Foundation is proud to be a founding partner of the One House Filmmakers Fund,” East West Bank chair and CEO Dominic Ng said in a statement. “One of our main goals is to advance diversity and inclusion in all industries, including entertainment and the arts. Strengthening storytelling by diverse filmmakers is a powerful way to build bridges between communities.”

The inaugural One House cohort includes Bhutanese filmmaker Arun Bhattarai, whose film Agent of Happiness will screen in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance this month. The other nine filmmakers and their projects are Naveen Chaubal (Pinball), Marissa Chibás (1972), StormMiguel Florez (Welcome to Roswell), Jalena Keane-Lee (Standing Above the Clouds), Sura Mallouh (Untitled Sura Mallouh Project), Walé Oyéjidé (Chiaroscuro), Otilia Portillo Padua (The Queendom), Shrihari Sathe (Doha – The Rising Sun) and Julie Forrest Wyman (Untitled Dwarfism Project).

“Sundance Institute has been championing artists to tell stories that reflect their lived realities for over 40 years. We are excited for the opportunity to partner with Gold House to provide vital funding to multicultural artists working in fiction and nonfiction to advance their projects and increase representation on and off screen,” Sundance Institute Artist Accelerator Program director Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs said in a statement. “The ten filmmakers selected for the inaugural year of the One House Filmmaker Fund are important voices working in independent film today, and we are thrilled to be able to continue elevating these voices.”

The One House fund is an application of Gold House’s second phase, dubbed Gold Bridge. The idea, which the Asian Pacific impact collective first unveiled at its glitzy annual Gold Gala, speaks to making connections across industries but also across cultural communities, which it is doing under its One House banner. Gold House has expanded its theater buyout model Gold Open to support opening weekend for movies centering on other historically excluded backgrounds; its One House Leadership Coalition works with multicultural funds to diversify corporate boards; and at Sundance last year, it partnered with The Asian American Foundation and Daniel Dae Kim’s 3AD to throw the festival’s first-ever Multicultural House Party, a celebration co-hosted by Latinx House, RespectAbility and other groups including Blackhouse, IllumiNative and Macro.

“Communities demand that the world we watch reflect the world we live in – on both sides of the camera,” Gold House Creative Equity Fund general manager Christine Yi said in a statement. “We’re thankful for the financial support of East West Bank Foundation and the partnership of our peer-leading multicultural organizations as we invest formidable capital, resources and platforms to create a first-of-its-kind investment and convening vehicle for the next generation of pioneering multicultural filmmakers. If we’re stronger together, then we’d better start now.”