Magdalene Brandeis (right) with MFA in Film director and Killer Films founder Christine Vachon.
Magdalene Brandeis, associate director of the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Film program offered in association with Killer Films, has been invited to The White House in Washington, D.C. for a special March on Washington Film Festival awards ceremony and screening on Wednesday, July 20. Brandeis served as a juror in the Festival’s inaugural Student & Emerging Filmmaker Competition this year.
Founded in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Festival includes 10 days of film screenings, discussions with filmmakers and producers, and panels on the groundbreaking activism of the 1960s, as well as a focus on the movement’s current work towards progress and equality.
Brandeis, who served as one of three jurors in the Student division of the competition, was a natural fit for the position based on her professional and personal experience.
“Early in my career I produced an episode on African-American filmmakers for AMC, spanning from Oscar Micheaux, who was born in 1884 and produced 44 films, to Spike Lee, and on to the present era,” Brandeis noted this week. “The historic birth and growth of film within the confines of the economic, cultural and mobility restrictions placed on African-Americans—and the relationship of all this to civil rights, freedom of speech and civil liberties—has always fascinated me.”
