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WINNER AUDIENCE AWARD: WINNER AUDIENCE AWARD: WINNER |
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"Cheryl Dunye's deft, intelligent movie follows an inmate, Treasure Lee (Yolonda Ross in her feature film debut), as she searches for [Brownie], the convict mother she hasn't seen since birth.... Ross is an amazing camera subject. She has the hard-packed look of a track sprinter who never wins. [Davenia] McFadden gives a ferocious performance [as Brownie].... STRANGER INSIDE is a film with impact." Order "Stranger Inside" from Wolfe Video or, the HBO Store
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STRANGER INSIDE is the story of a young African American woman named Treasure Lee who has been in and out of jail for as long as she can remember. Now, turning twenty-one, she is being transferred for the first time to the main State Facility for Women with one thing on her mind. All her young life, Treasure was told that her mother, Margaret "Brownie" Lee, was dead. So when one of her best Gang Girl friends rolls into State before her and tells her about a bad-ass lifer nick-named "Brownie," Treasure has to find out if her dream could possibly come true. Could there really be a chance to reconnect with the mother she's never been allowed to have? Or will this compelling reunion offer Treasure insight into herself she's never even imagined? Based on four years of research into the lives of incarcerated women, award-winning filmmaker Cheryl Dunye's STRANGER INSIDE is an authentic study of life on the inside, featuring a landscape of real characters -- from the young and tough Treasure to her queen of the roost mother Brownie, from the reforming gang girl Shadow to the hypocritical born-again embezzler Doodle, from Korean shop owner Min who says she killed a girl in self-defense to tough-as-nails Mama Cass who proudly took down her own daughter's rapist, from the drug-dealing Kit to her white supremacist cellie Fran, from pregnant Tanya to Xanex zombie Patrice. STRANGER INSIDE is a bittersweet drama about one young woman's unconscious struggle to bring the downward cycle of her own situation to a head by confronting the secrets and lies that have, until now, shaped and controlled her life. |
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The movie features the amazing work done by all involved -- especially production designer Candi Guterres, cinematographer Nancy Schrieber, editor Cecily Rhett, composer Mychael Danna, costume designer Frank Helmer, associate producers Yvonne Welbon and David Ebersole, co-writer Catherine Crouch and our supercool HBO exec Maud Nadler. STRANGER INSIDE premiered on HBO June 23, 2001. A huge BILLBOARD (!!!) on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights, across from the Sunset 5 and the Chateau Marmont, featured the film's beautiful star, Yolonda Ross, up there larger than life, staring out enigmatically over the traffic below. Posters were also featured on a building at the corner of 3rd Ave and 10th Street in New York. For more info on the film and its premiere on HBO go to http://www.hbo.com/films/ Yolonda Ross received a Gotham award for her breakthrough performance in Stranger Inside from the IFP on October 1, 2001, broadcast on BRAVO/IFC, 7pm, EST, Friday October 5, 2001 Order "Stranger Inside" from Wolfe Video or, the HBO Store
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STRANGER INSIDE by Cheryl Dunye The script was researched and written in 1998 while on a media fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Many months were spent documenting and discussing prison culture with inmates, lawyers, and social workers, to make an authentic fictionalized character study. In June of 1999, while in residence at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota, I took the script into the Shakopee Correction Facility for Women and workshoped with inmates and staff. The workshop was photographed by well-known Los Angeles based photographer Catherine Opie. I also acquired 50+ mugshots from Minnesota's State Historical Society's collection of women inmates dating back to 1920 and found prison blues music in the Library of Congress Archives from the 1930s and 1940s. A script reading with slides, music, and cast of actors including Laurie Carlos (Urban Bush Women, For Colored Girls), Peggy Shaw (Split Britches) and Djola Brenner (Pomo Afro Homos), added more truth and intensity to an already riveting project. The project was shot on DV (digital video). Once the film was cast, the cinematographer, key talent and I returned to the women's prison and workshoped the script with inmates. Actors and inmates collaborated in staging and improvising the script. This was one of the most important parts of this project and was key to its purpose of empowering women's voices and vision. A second documentary cinematographer will tape the entire workshop for a later feature project that focuses on the making of STRANGER INSIDE. It is important to me that this unique process of making art be documented. Never before has a film project been made examining the collaborative efforts of art making. Catherine Opie, the cast, the inmates and myself, the music artists, cinematographer and crew, will all be subjects in this document of empowerment and visibility, women working together for art and social change. |
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>> Dunye Filmography << the Watermelon Woman | Stranger Inside | My Baby's Daddy Untitled Portrait | the Potluck and the Passion | She Don't Fade | Janine | Greetings from Africa |
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Home | e-mail | Biography | Resume | Events | Links | Guestbook | Order | Films |
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Cheryl Dunye US - Temple University, 9C Annenberg Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19144 e-mail: info@cheryldunye.com ©2000-2005 Cheryl Dunye |
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