3rd Annual Long Beach Indie International Film, Media, and Music Festival to Showcase Diversity and Connect Urban Communities to Careers in Entertainment and the Arts
LONG BEACH, CALIF. (PRWEB) August 25, 2016 -- Celebrating global diversity, the 3rd annual Long Beach Indie International Film, Media, and Music Festival will take place Wednesday, August 31, 2016 through Sunday, September 4, 2016 at the Cinemark at the Pike Theaters, Long Beach Convention Center, and Renaissance Long Beach Hotel. Presented by Perfect Works, Long Beach Indie will screen more than 180 films, TV pilots, web series, and music videos from across the globe, showcase more than 100 international scholars and entertainment industry leaders as presenters, and expose more than 1,000 diverse youth and young adults to higher education and careers in arts and entertainment. Long Beach Indie includes the LBI International Film Festival (8/31-9/4), LBI Film, Media and Music Conference (9/2-9/3), LBI College and Career Fair (9/3), and the LBI Awards Gala (9/3).
Sponsors of LBI 2016 include; KCETLink, The California Endowment, Black Voice News, the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, BLU Educational Foundation, Café Sevilla, The Edge, The Campaign for Black Male Achievement, KJAZZ, Billy Johnson Jr. Presents, The Believe Foundation and the Hollywood Post.
“Long Beach Indie was created to celebrate diverse content and content creators, facilitate dialogue between scholars and the entertainment industry, and to be a bridge between urban communities and the entertainment industry,” states Founder and Perfect Works President Dr. Daniel E. Walker.
Since its inception in 2014, innovators such as three-time Emmy winner Charles Ragins (The Simpsons), Oscar nominee Margaret Avery (The Color Purple) and two-time DGA winner Jesus Salvador Trevino (Resurrection Blvd, Chicano: A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement) have shared their experiences as presenters. Additionally, films such as Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s The Dam Keeper have parlayed their awards at Long Beach Indie into Academy Award nominations.
2016 Long Beach Indie International Film Festival
The Long Beach Indie International Film Festival (8/31-9/4) opens on Wednesday, August 31 at 7:00 p.m. with South Bureau Homicide from Mark Earl Burman and Mike Cooley. The award-winning documentary offers a tense, gritty, and hopeful examination into the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau Homicide division and the mostly Black and Latino residents of South Los Angeles.
“We could have picked a lighter film but given all the things going on in our world regarding law enforcement and communities of color, I wanted to showcase something that epitomizes the role that film and the arts can play in educating and inspiring us to be better than our circumstance,” says Walker. The film is followed by an after-party at Café Sevilla featuring 16-year old Pop-Soul phenomena Isaiah Walker and the Iconic Music Experience.
Other highlights of the festival include Oscar Rene Lozoya’s How We Met featuring Emmy nominee and NAACP Image Award winner Ice-T (Law & Order SVU), Wes Miller’s Prayer Never Fails with Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Eric Roberts, Emmy and NAACP Image Award winner Lynn Whitfield, and Emmy nominee Corbin Bernsen, Jonathan Stein’s Out of the Village with Beasts of No Nation breakout star Abraham Attah, and Alain Maiki’s Devuelveme La Vida/ Give Me Back My Life with Dad Dager (Tierra de Reyes).
In the documentary category Ebony Taylor’s A Beautiful Genocide, Robyn Symon's award-winning Uncle Gloria: One Helluva Ride, and You See Me from Linda J. Brown, head of the cinematography division at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, compliment an encore screening of Al Gragg III’s Jamaica House (LBI 2015 Winner for Best Documentary Short). Gragg's film includes extensive, never-before-seen footage of hip hop icons Tupac Shakur, Notorious BIG, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre in their youth.
2016 Long Beach Indie Film, Media, and Music Conference and Long Beach Indie College and Career Fair
The LBI Film, Media, and Music Conference and LBI College and Career Fair bring together international scholars and entertainment industry leaders to discuss the past, present and future of film, media, and music while offering their collective wisdom to aspiring and emergent innovators. In 2016 Grammy nominees Xocoyotzin Herrera and Nathan East, NAACP Image Award-winner Terri J. Vaughn, Emmy winner P. Frank Williams, social media icon Tay Zonday, digital media leaders John Lenac and Chanel Landreaux, and record industry innovators Claude Lataillades and Vicki Mack-Lataillades join scholars from institutions such as the University of Southern California, UCLA, the US Naval Academy, Harvard, New York University, Emory, CSU Los Angeles, Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University, CSU Long Beach, CSU Northridge, Loyola Marymount University, and Howard University at both events.
Santa Fe University of Art and Design/Long Beach Indie Diversity Scholarship
To help broaden the pipeline of women and people of color in the ranks of Hollywood directors and screenwriters, the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and the Long Beach Indie International Film, Media, and Music Festival will award their SFUAD/LBI scholarship to a deserving young filmmaker at the LBI Awards Gala on Saturday, September 3, 2016. The four-year award reduces tuition at SFUAD by more than 40%.
The full festival schedule is available at http://www.longbeachindie.com and individual film tickets are on sale at http://www.cinemark.com and the Long Beach Indie website. Festival passes and tickets for the LBI Opening Night Film & After-Party, LBI Awards Gala, LBI Film, Media, & Music Conference, and Free LBI College and Career Fair are available at http://www.longbeachindie.com and Eventbrite.
About Long Beach Indie (http://www.longbeachindie.com)
Created by Perfect Works, the mission of the Long Beach Indie International Film, Media, and Music Festival is to celebrate global diversity through film, media, and music; create a dialogue between scholars and the entertainment industry; and connect urban communities to careers in arts and entertainment. Since 2014 Long Beach Indie has screened more than 400 films from 50+ countries, attracted more than 4,000 attendees, and drawn Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, Golden Globe, Latin Grammy, ALMA, Directors Guild of America, and NAACP Image Award winners and nominees along with top scholars and admissions professionals from across the globe as presenters.
About Daniel E. Walker, Ph.D.
Long Beach Indie is the brainchild of scholar, filmmaker and Perfect Works President Dr. Daniel E. Walker. He is a professor of history at El Camino College and producer/director of the documentary films When Roosters Crow, Sol Brothers, and The Ten (in post-production) and a forthcoming 10-part documentary on Gospel Music in partnership with KCETLink and the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Walker is also the head of the Gospel Music History Archive at the University of Southern California and the Board Chair of both the BLU Educational Foundation and the Believe Foundation.
About Perfect Works (http://www.ourperfectworks.com)
Called to a mission of education, inspiration, and social change, Perfect Works creates one-of-a-kind content in the mediums of film, theater, television, digital media, and scholarly research. It also conduct's historical research for film and television and creates career pipeline programs to expose urban communities to options in arts, entertainment and technology.
Sheri L. Stuart, Perfect Works/Long Beach Indie, http://www.longbeachindie.com, +1 9096097992, [email protected]
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