According to deadline.com, writer/director Merawi Gerima’s Residue won the Audience Award at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival, as well as receiving an Honorable Mention for the Grand Jury Prize.
First-time feature director Gerima is the son of acclaimed independent filmmaker Haile Gerima (Sanfoka). Merawi Gerima also produced and directed Residue, and his cast includes Obinna Nwachukwu, Dennis Lindsey, Taline Stewart, Jacari Dye, Julian Selman, Melody Tally, Ramon Thompson, and Derron Scott.
Check out the trailer below:
Residue tells the story of Jay, a young man who arrives home to find his neighborhood gentrified beyond recognition. Demetrius, his childhood best friend, is missing, but none of the remaining black folks trust Jay enough to provide any answers. Jay’s frustration compounds as he also finds himself alienated in the city at large, attacked from all sides. Jay visits his last friend Dion in prison, but leaves feeling powerless and infuriated. One final, chance confrontation results in Jay succumbing to the same forces as did his friends.
Stephanie G. Adams, Dean of the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology at Old Dominion University, was honored with the Harriet Tubman Award at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in June. The Tubman Award is given annually to someone who has fought to increase gender and racial diversity within the 350 accredited engineering schools that operate in the United States.
To date, African American women account for just 0.54 percent of the nation’s roughly 28,000 engineering faculty members and fewer than 1 percent of U.S. engineering students.
Jeffrey Harris, founder and managing partner of a consultancy that specializes in the recruitment and advancement of traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering, technology and medicine, presented the award in Salt Lake City. “Harriet Tubman admonished us never to stop — to keep going,” Harris said. “Dean Adams’ career is a model for Ms. Tubman’s words,” he said.
Harris told Adams that he couldn’t imagine anyone more deserving of this year’s award — or more representative of its namesake, the 19th century abolitionist who led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad, an elaborate network of safe houses.
An honor graduate of North Carolina A&T State University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Adams, 52, was selected as president-elect of the 12,000-member ASEE this March. She is committed to advancing women in academic engineering during her term in 2018-19.
“If we want to see a shift among women in engineering, we need to acknowledge that, just like in Hollywood, we must start doing some things differently,” Adams said. “Change is needed at every level.”
American Society for Engineering Education indicates that there are 368 engineering colleges in the United States. According to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), there were 63 female engineering deans or directors across the country in January 2018, representing approximately 17% of the total leaders of engineering colleges in the U.S.
An elementary school in Utah has traded one Jackson for another in a change that many say was a long time coming.
Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City will no longer be named for Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, whose slave ownership and treatment of Native Americans are often cited in the debate over memorializing historical figures associated with racism.
Instead, the school will honor Mary Jackson, the first black female engineer at nasa whose story, and the stories of others like her at the space agency, was chronicled in Hidden Figures, a 2016 film based on a book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly.
A unanimous vote by the the Salt Lake City school board this week was met with a standing ovation from the crowd in the room, reportsThe Salt Lake Tribune’s Erin Alberty. School employees and parents have discussed changing the elementary’s school name “for years,” Alberty reported, and last year started polling and meeting with parents, alumni, and others. More than 70 percent supported the change. Of the school’s 440 students, 85 percent are students of color, according to the Salt Lake City School District.
Mary Jackson, a native of Hampton, Virginia, worked as a math teacher, a receptionist, and an Army secretary before she arrived at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1951 as a member of the West Area Computing unit, a segregated division where African American women spent hours doing calculations with pencil and paper, including for the trajectories of the country’s earliest space missions.
Two years in, a NASA engineer picked Jackson to help him work on a wind tunnel that tested flight hardware by blasting it with winds nearly twice the speed of sound. The engineer suggested Jackson train to become an engineer. To do that, Jackson had to take night courses in math and physics from the University of Virginia, which were held at the segregated Hampton High School. Jackson successfully petitioned the city to let her take the classes. She got her promotion to engineer in 1958. After 34 years at the space agency, Jackson retired in 1985. She died in 2005, at the age of 83.
Ryan Coogler accepts the Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic for Fruitvale onstage at the Awards Night Ceremony during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival at Basin Recreation Field House on January 26, 2013 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — The dramatic film “Fruitvale” and the documentary “Blood Brother” won over audiences and Sundance Film Festival judges. Both American films won audience awards and grand jury prizes Saturday at the Sundance Awards. “Fruitvale” is based on the true story of Oscar Grant, who was 22 years old when he was shot and killed in a public transit station in Oakland, California. First-time filmmaker Ryan Coogler wrote and directed the dramatic narrative.
