Please join SFFILM Makers for a conversation with CJ Hunt the director of The Neutral Ground.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Live Talk
Tue, Aug 17 at 5:00 pm PT
Talk
Description
Humor can often diffuse a heated and polarizing situation or offer laughter as a method of healing and processing our pain and anger. CJ Hunt has masterfully used humor to this degree in both his standup and as a producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. But what happens when a topic is too painful or personal to laugh at? In Hunt’s stirring debut feature, The Neutral Ground, he struggles with this very dilemma the more entrenched he gets in confronting white supremacy. And since he’s the star of his own film, Hunt must juggle not only when to use humor, but his own subjectivity towards the Confederate sympathizers he meets along the way in the film as both director and star.
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CJ Hunt is a comedian and filmmaker living in NYC. He is currently a field producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He has also served as a staff writer for A&E’s Black and White, and a field producer for BET’s The Rundown with Robin Thede. Before working in late night, CJ spent nine years living in New Orleans where – in 2015 – he began filming what he thought would be a quick and easy confederate monument removal. CJ is an alumnus of Firelight Media’s Doc Lab and New Orleans Film Festival’s Emerging Voices program. He is also a 2020 New America Fellow and a regular host of The Moth. A graduate from Brown University’s Africana Studies department, CJ is endlessly fascinated by race and comedy’s ability to say what we can’t. @cjhunt
Jameka Autry is a producer, director, and 2020 Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellow. Past fellowships and honors include the 2019 Sundance Creative Producing Lab Fellowship, 2017 Impact Partners Creative Producing Fellowship, and 2018 Double Exposure Investigative Film Fellowship. In 2018 she was selected as part of the inaugural DOC NYC 40 Under 40 List. She was recently awarded the Sundance/A&E Brave Storyteller Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and 2019 Post Graduate Fellowship at the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Currently she balances her film projects with her new role as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Most recently she completed work on Through The Night, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. Other producing works include Emmy award winning Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops, which won the jury grand prize at SXSW and Boston International Film Festival, and premiered on HBO in Fall 2019. Jameka has also produced MARATHON: The Patriots Day Bombing (HBO), In My Father’s House (Showtime), Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (Sundance ’18) and served as a Consulting Producer on We The Animals (Netflix) and Love Gilda (CNN).
Trailer