Producers' Forum: For Venida, For Kalief by Sisa Bueno

For Venida, For Kalief by Sisa Bueno

(USA, 2025, 93 min)

For Venida, For Kalief is a film that re-imagines the “criminal justice” documentary as a poetic collage. Debuting the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder, an African-American teenager who inspired incarceration reform in the United States. The film weaves verité, poetic visuals, rare archival imagery of 1970s New York, and most importantly, deep emotion, and explores the long, vicious cycle of mass incarceration over the last 50 years.

Sisa Bueno is a Black & Indigenous Latina film & multimedia maker who is fascinated by people of all cultures and seeks to awaken our own empowerment via artful storytelling. She studied both film production and interactive technologies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). Sisa spent years filming Indigenous and Afro-Latine social movements in South America.