Director and producer Gwen Wynne (“Wild About Harry”) is set to unveil a new funding initiative for female filmmakers. A press release announced that she’s launching the Eos World Fund at Sundance today. The program’s mission is to provide financing and distribution to “a selected group of visionary women and their groundbreaking projects.” Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”) and Nina Menkes (“Phantom Love”) are Eos’ inaugural recipients.
As Wynne, Eos’ CEO and Artistic Director, told Women and Hollywood, the fund gives innovative, diverse female voices a needed platform. “Right now we need bold filmmakers, women of color and all women with alternative points of view, challenging the systems that have developed around the world,” she said.
Dash and Menkes’ Eos funding will go towards their next films. Dash’s “Cypher” is a film noir-thriller hybrid set in 2000. It centers on encryption specialists, hackers, and afro-futurists “who hold the key to protecting global privacy rights, the civil rights movement of the 21st century.” Menkes’ “Minotaur Rex,” set in modern Jerusalem, uses the ancient Greek myth of the labyrinth to explore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Julie Dash’s and Nina Menkes’ films have broken new ground in cinematic language; they are rock stars, though overlooked rock stars,” Wynne observed. “‘Cypher’ and ‘Minotaur Rex’ are going to blow people’s socks off.” She said that the filmmakers’ works “reflect an ethos that the Eos World Fund wants to create and share in the world. We intend to provide financing to provocative, fiercely independent filmmakers that also identify ways to reshape cinematic language so that it is no longer racist and sexist. Both Nina and Julie care about the ethics and the way stories are told and made.”
The Eos World Fund Launch will be held in Park City Utah today. The event will include Menkes’ lecture, “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema,” and a panel discussion between Dash and Menkes, which will be moderated by Eos Board member Rachel Watanabe-Batton.
