Successful Kickstarter Campaign

SOD Funded with Kickstarter

Thanks to 238 backers, we raised 101% of our $50,000 Kickstarter goal! We had enough donations to activate a portion of a challenge grant to be pledged towards the campaign and additional donations outside of Kickstarter.

We are awed by how many people demonstrated support for Selling Our Daughters. Many of the donors are unknown to us and others have supported Shine’s films again and again over the years. We are so lucky to have them all.

Our team is hard at work finishing the film and we hope to have it done in time for a Spring 2016 festival premiere.

Child Labor in the Fields: Tobacco Picking

By Susan MacLaury

Just a month ago, we posted pictures of Victor, Zulema and Perla, the three American teen migrant farm workers we had profiled in our 2011 film, The Harvest (La Cosecha). We were reintroduced at Shine Global’s 10th anniversary party and over the weekend we had a chance to learn in depth how they were since making this film, the effects it had had on them, and where they currently were in their lives.

It was great hearing how Zulema was a college freshman, Perla was planning to go to graduate school, and Victor was achieving his dream of becoming a car mechanic. Still, we knew that all had family members, some of them younger siblings, a few of the hundreds of thousands still working in the fields with minimal protections.

That point was brought home to me today when a friend sent me this clip about a current Human Rights Watch campaign to educate the public about the poisonous effects of picking tobacco on underage workers. Memories surfaced about our research into this subject, interviews with prospective film subjects, production of The Harvest (La Cosecha), and our screenings on Capitol Hill in 2011 to try to convince lawmakers to vote in the CARE Act (Children’s Act for Responsible Employment) sponsored by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard. Both she and then Secretary of the US Department of Labor, Hilda Solis, fought hard, but in vain, for legislative reform for young farm workers.

Human Rights Watch has commissioned multiple investigative studies on the wellbeing of young farmworkers over the last 15 years with some successes. In 2014, some of the major US tobacco growers banned children under 16 from working in the tobacco fields, but excluded older teens from their policies, teens who are still vulnerable to the dangerous effects of tobacco picking. Shine Global applauds them for their continued concern. We believe that the powerful imagery they employ as documentarians will make a difference in the lives of these children and urge you to watch and act.

Eagle Huntress to Premiere at Sundance 2016

Eagle Huntress take flight

Sundance Institute today completed its feature film lineup for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival with the announcement that Eagle Huntress, directed by Otto Bell and produced in association with Shine Global, will be having its world premiere in the Sundance Kids section.  The Shine Global team will be in attendance at the festival.

The film follows Aisholpan, a 13 year old nomad girl, as she prepares to take on the all-male, all-grown-up world of Eagle Hunters at the annual Festival in the snow-capped Altai Mountains of North West Mongolia. Through breathtaking and intimate cinematography, this film will frame the universal themes of female empowerment, coming of age, and the onset of modernity.

The Sundance Film Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most groundbreaking films of the past three decades, including Boyhood, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Fruitvale Station, Whiplash, Brooklyn, Twenty Feet from Stardom, Life Itself, The Cove, The End of the Tour, Blackfish, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Super Size Me, Dope, Little Miss Sunshine, sex, lies, and videotape, Reservoir Dogs, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious and Napoleon Dynamite. Shine Global’s first documentary War/Dance, directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, won the Best Director – Documentary award at its world premiere at the festival in 2007.