2020 Winner

Jessica Sanders- Picking Cotton

Jessica Sanders is an Academy Award – nominated, Sundance and Cannes Award – winning director and producer of narrative and documentary films and commercials. Her pilot “Embrace” just won the 2020 SXSW Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Episodic Pilot. She has been passionate about directing “Picking Cotton” since she featured Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson’s exceptional story in her Sundance-winning documentary “After Innocence,” a game-changer in criminal justice reform.

“Picking Cotton” is based on the New York Times bestseller about the riveting true story of Jennifer Thompson, a Southern white college student who was raped at knifepoint and Ronald Cotton, the black man she identified as her rapist.  After spending 11 years in prison Ronald was exonerated and freed, the first case overturned by DNA in North Carolina. The two are now friends and activists for criminal justice reform. In an amazing twist, Ron solved his own case when he realized he was serving time with the real rapist. John Grisham says, “Few stories of wrongful convictions have happy endings, but this one…is far different. It is the powerful account of violence, rage, redemption, and, ultimately, forgiveness.”

2020 Finalists

Memphis loves Seneca. He’s a millennial with severe cerebral palsy, and he wants to be a filmmaker and travel the world. Seneca’s an aspiring opera singer, living with her mom, deep in oil country. Seneca just wants to be friends. MEMPHIS follows five years of this unfolding relationship as it takes us from Texas to California to Italy and back, and illuminates the turbulent realities facing a young man with a severe disability as he strives toward independence, and of a young woman looking to escape the drudgery of small-town Texas. As financial responsibilities mount and Memphis’ crush threatens their friendship, Memphis and Seneca must forge new identities and attitudes towards sex, family, work, and life itself, clinging to their dreams of a brighter future.

Ben Edelman is an award-winning actor and filmmaker originally from Lower Merion, PA, just outside Philadelphia. He is producing his first feature documentary Memphis alongside director David Zucker. Memphis was chosen as one of 10 IFP Labs Fellows in 2019 and as the winner of the 2019 Derek Freese Documentary Fund, a $35,000 grant awarded to one film every two years. Before Memphis, Edelman co-created Milkman and Samantha Moonley’s Greatest Feeling which both took top honors at NFFTY, the world’s largest film festival for young filmmakers and co-produced Dot (Cannes’ Short Film Corner). As an actor, Ben trains with David Vadim. He most recently acted in Admissions, for which he received an Obie Award and Drama Desk Nomination while performing at Lincoln Center with Jessica Hecht before transferring to London’s West End in 2019. He has also worked on Broadway’s Significant Other, CBS’s Instinct, Braindead, and The Good Wife. He co- founded “The Commonground”, an organization dedicated to introducing artists across disciplines, which now spans 500+ alumni.

In the summer of 2005 Shayan is uprooted from the only home he’s known, moving around the world with his family from Tehran, Iran to Orange County, California. Once the school year starts, Shayan, a sophomore, finds himself increasingly embarrassed by his inability to fit in with his classmates. His clothes, the food he eats, even the pronunciation of his own name all become a source of embarrassment for him. Despite his earnest attempts to embrace his new American life, he’s unable to make friends, strike up a meaningful conversation with his crush, or avoid racist comments from other students. His relationship with his family becomes strained, especially in the shadow of his sister’s seemingly seamless assimilation, and he finds his parents’ attempts to connect with him increasingly overbearing.

In a last, desperate attempt to fit in, Shayan, despite having a crippling fear of public speaking, joins the mock trial team. Amongst of an eclectic mix of overachievers and misfit intellectuals, Shayan finally finds a place where he belongs. However, at a crucial moment in trial competition, he freezes, ruining the chance of a win for the entire team. Ashamed and embarrassed once more, Shayan quits and goes back to his anti-social and isolating behavior.

This adversity, however, proves an opportunity for emotional growth. After learning that his sister is in fact being bullied at school and not breezily adapting to life in America, Shayan realizes that his own self-obsession was blinding him to connecting and understanding those around him. With newfound empathy, he reconnects with his family, makes amends with the mock trial team, and is welcomed back into their ranks. In the final round of competition, Shayan is able to speak from the heart to give a rousing and moving statement.

Shayan ends the school year with a greater sense of his own complicated identity and finally gains the confidence to correct people when they mispronounce his name. As he tells his new friends, it’s “Shaw-Yawn,” not “Cheyenne.”

Mariyam Mahbub is a producer specializing in underrepresented narratives and social impact stories. Informed by her childhood in Bangladesh, she loves creating work that examines the immigrant experience in America, familial ties, as well as dissecting how we bond with one another. Mariyam was selected as a Fellow in the Film Independent Incubator Lab where she developed an eight-episode web series, Contemporary Mating Rituals, which went on to premiere at the San Diego Latino Film Festival & the International Seoul WebFest. Mariyam is also an alumna of Project Involve, Film Independent’s renowned artist development program where she was awarded the LMU Fellowship grant. Her works from Project Involve have screened at festivals around the globe and were lauded for highlighting topics such as homelessness, creating awareness of toxic masculinity, and shedding light on the modern Muslim American experience. Her short film, Wednesday, was acquired by HBO and is currently available to stream on the platform. In addition to her producing work, Mariyam spent several years working in the international film financing space at IM Global/Open Road as well as the TV development space at Anonymous Content. Mariyam received her MFA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University. She previously studied at Cambridge University in the UK and is an alumna of the University of California, Riverside.

Based on Alexander Weinstein’s short story, Rocket Night, our story follows 12-year old Cora, a quiet girl who has seen all of the children she finds exciting, whose company she values or seeks, rejected and expelled by the community. But this average looking community doesn’t merely shun the outliers, they hold an annual election and blast the least-liked child into space. Suffocated by the repressive system she has inherited, she wishes upon falling stars, longing to set her creative spirit free no matter the consequences.

The arrival of an adventerous (“rebellious”) new student shakes Cora out of her fear and paralysis, and awakens her true self. Defying the forces of authority within her town, her school, and her own family, she channels her newly discovered creativity into the construction of her own rocket, and escapes the constraints of earth on her own terms. Once in space, she joins the thriving celestial community of like-minded cast-offs who no longer fear reprisal for being who they are.

But youth doesn’t last forever, and neither do these rockets, particularly our hero’s homemade ship. But oh was it worth it to be in the rarified air, even if only briefly! Her plummeting rocket becomes the shooting star wished upon by the next wave of suppressed outsiders who don’t feel at home, or even welcome, in this world.

Rocket Night is a Coming of Age fairy tale propelled by practical effects and magical realism. We start in a heightened reality reminiscent of early Tim Burton and contrast the cold, machine-like nature of a soulless life on earth with the wonderful chaos and beauty of the creative community in space: it’s not Gravity, it’s Gondry and Gilliam—hand-painted theatrical backdrops to represent the diversity of the endless galaxy—full of artfully expressive rockets that have been customized by the kids in space.

S.C.V. TAYLOR is a writer and film producer who believes that deep truths can only be understood through stories. He is currently in post-production on Dorie Barton’s psychological-drama WELCOME TO THE SHOW. This summer he will publish “Summer of ’74” a comic book parody origin story of how “Star Wars” really began in a desert truckstop in 1974. His two previous films can be seen on Netflix — the
Christmas comedy HOLLY STAR written and directed by Michael Nickles and executive produced by Edward Burns, and the teen witch thriller THE WITCH FILES written and directed by Kyle Rankin. Taylor began his career in Los Angeles as a writers’ assistant on MR. & MRS. SMITH , a producer on Big Brother and developed a sitcom with Victoria Jackson (SNL). Taylor is the great-grandson of Stanner E. V. Taylor, a writer-director in the Silent Era who wrote over 100 films and pioneered many of the storytelling techniques we use today. S.C.V. Taylor believes he inherited his artistic ambition from him.

2020 Producers Panel

2020 Pitch Fest Host