Stateless
(Dominican Republic, Haiti, USA, Canada, 2020, 96 min)

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929, rendering more than 200,000 people stateless. Director Michèle Stephenson’s documentary follows Dominican Lawyer Rosa Iris, as she defends the rights of Dominicans of Hatian descent against deportation. 

Elena
(Dominican Republic, Haiti, USA, Canada, 2021, 30 min)

Michèle Stephenson’s new documentary follows Elena, the young protagonist of the film, and her family as they stand to lose their legal residency in the Dominican Republic. Negotiating a mountain of opaque bureaucratic processes and a racist, hostile society, we witness Elena and her family struggle to remain in the country they’ve called home for generations. 

Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and her experience as a human rights lawyer to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces. She tells compelling, deeply intimate stories that are created by, for and about  BIPOC communities. Her films reimagine Black diasporic community while highlighting personal and collective resistance to systemic oppression. She is a three-time Emmy Award nominee and winner of Tribeca and Sundance Festival Jury Prizes  and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. Her book, Promises Kept, written with co-authors Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Stephenson is also a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Capital artist. Stateless was awarded Best Feature Documentary at the 2020 BlackStar film festival.

PRODUCERS’ FORUM SCREENINGS SUPPORTED BY THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, AND PENNSYLVANIA COUNCIL ON THE ARTS