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Production
2024

For Venida, For Kalief

IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee

  • Black woman with a trucker hat looks through a camera
    Sisa Bueno, Director
  • white man in gray shirt with beard over blurred building background
    David Felix Sutcliffe , Producer
Stacked polaroids.

About the Project

FOR VENIDA, FOR KALIEF debuts the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder. The film weaves a lyrical and cinematic mosaic of legacy, love, and community resistance, all leading up to the movement to transform Rikers Island—the world’s most notorious jail—into a renewable energy center. The film intertwines spirituality with advocacy, crafting an interplay of visuals, sound and a story that resonates with the soul, offering a bold reimagining of criminal justice storytelling.

 

Project Team

    Black woman with a trucker hat looks through a camera

    Sisa Bueno

    Originally from New York City, Sisa Bueno is a Director-Cinematographer dedicated to exploring powerful ripple effects within humanity. Her work as a filmmaker has received support from the Ford Foundation, ITVS-PBS Open Call, Sundance Documentary Fund, IDA Pare Lorentz grant, Firelight Media Lab Fellowship, and the Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellowship among others for her current work in progress, FOR VENIDA, FOR KALIEF. She studied both film production and interactive technologies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU), where she is currently an adjunct instructor, and a traveling instructor for the Film Independent Global Media Makers program.

     

    white man in gray shirt with beard over blurred building background

    David Felix Sutcliffe

    David Felix Sutcliffe is a Sundance and Emmy Award-winning producer committed to ambitious and justice-driven cinema. David’s films have been distributed by Netflix, Hulu, POV, BBC, Canal+, screened at Sundance, Tribeca, True/False, CPH:DOX, and funded by Sundance, Ford, Facet, and Field of Vision among others. David’s debut feature (T)ERROR (Netflix, 2015) won a Sundance Special Jury Prize, an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and was featured in The New York Times Magazine and This American Life.