“We Committed Heart and Soul and Funding”: Zeyba Rahman Discusses DDF’s Building Bridges Program

With a flurry of announcements in the last six months, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges program has stepped squarely into the film funding space in a concerted effort to broaden the pipeline of Muslim-American filmmakers in media and entertainment. The program is partnering with a handful of film institutions, most notably the Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Center for Asian American Media, Sundance Institute, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau, on a series of public activations, funds, and fellowships. The programs have taken place in a variety of spaces, from Sundance festival to IDA’s own Getting Real. The activities caught our attention.

Program director Zeyba Rahman has spent over a decade at the Doris Duke Foundation. Previously, she was a director at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco; artistic director of Arts Midwest’s Caravanserai: A Place Where Cultures Meet; curator of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Mic Check: Hip-Hop From North Africa and the Middle East; and a creative consultant for the Met’s Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia Galleries. A practiced arts producer and administrator, she’s on the board of directors for Grantmakers in the Arts. Last month, we spoke to Rahman about the recent changes in Building Bridges and why documentary film is particularly promising for achieving culture shift and social change. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: With the CAAM and the RISE grants, and recently announced support for the Sundance Documentary Film Program, it seems like Building Bridges is investing in film re-granting in a major way. Is this a change in approach?

ZEYBA RAHMAN: Yes. So we launched this new initiative, which is focused on U.S. Muslim storytelling, this year in January at Sundance, and we’ve been going ever since. The RISE grant was actually a couple of years ago, we did it in partnership with MacArthur and Ford and other colleagues, and that was to help them launch as an organization. Specifically, these new grants are to support storytellers and storytelling. MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau are supported to create meeting hubs at major film festivals and entertainment hubs so that the storytellers can come together with industry professionals and philanthropy. They can meet each other, of course, but also explore collaborations and form a way of moving forward together by combining resources.

So that’s what the Muslim House events are for, and to create a space where the broader entertainment sector can learn about U.S. Muslim culture. In June, we held a Muslim House in partnership with Tribeca film festival’s programming arm. And then with the IDA [at Getting Real], we had the Muslim Meetup and other events, you did a showcase. It was quite an exciting time. Documentary announced the Building Bridges Documentary Fund, with CAAM. We had a series of concentrated activities around the IDA conference Getting Real and similarly with CAAMFest and others.

We have a grant to Sundance Institute, and that is for the Building Bridges Fellowships, which they will co-program with the Islamic Scholarship Fund, who are also an inaugural grantee. And so they’re going to work together. It’s a historic partnership to create these immersive professional development and skills development, craft development of our very talented filmmakers who are going to tell US Muslim stories. There’s also a Completion Fund grant to Sundance for that last mile funding for films that, as you well know, Abby, need polishing up at the last minute before they premiere.

D: It can be really difficult to get attendance and industry attention at busy film festivals. Muslim House is a new initiative that was held at Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca. How do you measure the impact of whether or not something like Muslim House worked?

ZR: The first thing in thinking about this initiative and in talking to Sue Obeidi, who’s the director of MPAC’s Hollywood Bureau, was that we had to establish a presence for the community. Having a named space establishes a presence. You have Macro Lounge, you have Gold House, now we have Muslim House. We have not had that problem of attendance, which makes us realize that there is pent-up demand and we’re meeting demand. It was slightly different at SXSW, a giant commercial enterprise, in that we were on the main stage for two panels, but we were also competing against one of our very own filmmaker’s screening, which was at the same time. So, the audience does get split. But I have to say still, I think we’ve done this first year very well. This is the testing year.

I think it’s only going to grow because the word is getting out. This is the year of announcements, of establishing our presence. Now it’s a question of building in that habit of people looking for Muslim House, looking for events at Muslim House, and there’ll be collaborations. I think certainly our audience is going to grow.

D: You have a propensity to encourage collaborations between other organization. The meetup and the panel at Getting Real were programmed with the Islamic Scholarship Fund. Many grantors want their grantees to collaborate. But how do you think about this? Are you making introductions between different entities? How are you thinking about the ecosystem of Muslim storytelling?

ZR: We identified certain gaps in the ecosystem, a missing layer, which is exactly this, that there is no space for creators from the community to meet. It was more like a pop-up situation. Very motivated people got together and they put something up, but it has been hard to sustain. What really was needed was this layer of support and also equally importantly, a network of grantees and allies who work together. And it’s in the working together very intentionally that we can advance and really maximize opportunities.

Our four inaugural grantees know this, that we are taking a coalition approach and we are embedded with them in this way that we support as booster rockets on the side. We’re in it, our grantees are in it, and allies from various corners from the entertainment industry, from media and philanthropy, are also a part of this coalition. So it’s our belief that that is the way that we really can move the needle. We can at the same time, of course, continue to do our work from our individual spots. In the case of the IDA, the way it came together was very fast, but it caught fire. At Getting Real, you could have had one panel, you could have had one gathering, but when you bring it together as a whole set of activities and partner together, it’s that much richer. It reaches that much further.

D: You are supporting CAAM with a multi-year grant. What does it look like on your end? This is the launch year, and I know that the deadline for the fund is this week [of the interview]. What’s the difference, for example, between year one versus year two and three in terms of your support—what will change on your end and what are you hoping to see?

ZR: This is our launch year and it is the largest documentary fund of its kind for U.S. Muslim storytelling. It’s another historic moment. In this first year, CAAM will select 10 projects, and those 10 will become the inaugural cohort for them, and then they will continue. They’ve also already done other things, which is really exciting. For CAAMFest, they partnered with the Islamic Scholarship Fund and Aizzah [Fatima, artist development and partnerships manager at ISF] and Iman [Zawahry, film programs director] to create a Muslim film showcase for the first time. Four films from the network of the Islamic Scholarship Fund were shown in a special showcase. There was a meetup of makers, storytellers, and there was a panel that Aizzah moderated. So that’s a great start for a first-time relationship.

Similarly, at Sundance, ISF and Sundance partnered together to bring six ISF fellows to Sundance for an immersive experience—the kind of experience that a VIP would get when they come to a film festival. So they had a curated set of films that they watched, a curated set of panels that they went to, and meetings with the Sundance cohorts across the board from Sundance Labs, and also of course coming into Muslim House. They had a handheld, very bespoke experience.

D: After three years of the Building Bridges Fund, there will be 30 selected filmmakers. That’s quite a lot in our field. Between 30 documentary filmmakers, they will essentially know everybody in the field.

ZR: And that’s the point. They will continue to participate in the activities because they’re part of the network now. And they will give back to the new cohort and share back. We’re going to have the first ISF-Sundance Building Bridges Fellows lab in the fall. And that’s going to be an immersive experience of bringing their first set of grantees, the ones that went to the Sundance Festival and are going through their year now, alongside the newly chosen ones. There will be an overlap.

D: I’d like to end this interview by thinking about documentary film in the broader media landscape, because that is one of the interesting things about the Building Bridges program. It’s not just documentary film that you are granting out to. You’re thinking about arts and media quite broadly. There are grants to museums that your program makes. There are grants to writers’ workshops, to university programs, some of them arts institutions affiliated. Some of them just appear to be slightly more academic programs that are creating public education type media. Where is documentary in the media landscape for you? Is it just another node in what constitutes media? Or is there something special in particular about documentary film?

ZR: To answer your question, I just need to provide a little bit of background. Until 2023, we funded projects, and now we’re moving to funding platforms, hence CAAM, Sundance, and MPAC. And that’s the critical difference. For instance, we funded an opera for the Spoleto Festival called Omar, and Rhiannon Giddens was the librettist. And it’s a story of Omar ibn Said. However, we’re not funding projects as such anymore. We are funding platforms. The other shift is that we have supported literary, performing, and media arts in the past up until the end of ’23. But we are on pause with that, and we’ve gone full on into media and entertainment, namely documentaries, features, episodic, and immersive. That’s all we’re doing for the next three years. We committed heart and soul and funding to that full on. It’s the concentration.

When we talk about the network of alumni, about the inaugural grantees, we’re talking about those who are in this concentrated initiative, accelerating U.S. Muslim stories. Documentaries occupy a central role. Our largest grant was to CAAM for the next three years. And that is to really build the power and the storytelling that is both accurate and authentic through documentary films. Documentaries occupy a central place for us, because we want to work with our grantees to put out stories and narratives that are reflective of the U.S. Muslim experience, to counter negative stereotyping or popularly held notions of what Muslims are, because most people get their information about Muslims either through the news or they get it through popular culture. So we’re meeting them there.

D: The other intervention could be directly within news and popular culture as opposed through documentaries, which is a form of popular culture, but is not the predominant mode. I’d like to dig a little bit more around this idea of documentary film as the vehicle for this concentrated intervention. What is it about documentary in particular that makes it the right medium for this?

ZR: Documentaries very often come from bearing witness, from lifting up a particular point of view, and do so with authenticity and represent a particular community, a particular idea, a particular event. But it’s all grounded in reality. And what is the ultimate impulse of an artist, of a creator? It is to express their ideas through stories because they’re storytellers, whatever the medium is. It can be the performing arts, it can be film, it can be media. We hope that this initiative will encourage others to come forward and join us, join you, and join others doing this work. Instead of someone else telling our story, we must tell our own stories.

Abby Sun is IDA’s Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary.