Making Cinema Matter in Baltimore is a FREE artist-led workshop and screening series featuring five nationally recognized visiting filmmakers.

Distinguished filmmakers will lead workshops and community seminars that connect their films and filmmaking to social, creative, or cultural issues in Baltimore. 

Participants will explore impacts of film and media; to learn emerging practices in filmmaking; and to build local and national professional networks.

This project is presented in partnership with ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ (¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ), Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Film Festival/Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre, the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund, and Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.
The series is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Past Masterclasses

RaMell Ross
FREE Screening of Hale County This Morning, This Evening: Fri Oct 5 | 7pm
Masterclass: Sat Oct 6 | 10am-1pm

In this first masterclass with RaMell Ross, the director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, we held a conversation about his career (which traces from basketball to large format photography to film), and the power of documentary to explore issues of race, identity, and humanity.

RaMell Ross is an artist, filmmaker and writer based in RI and Al. His work has appeared in places like the NY Times, Aperture, Harper’s Magazine,TIME, Oxford American, and the Walker Arts Center. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist fellowship. His feature documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and has screened at MoMA and Lincoln Center. RaMell double majored in English and Sociology at Georgetown University and teaches in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. Variety called Ross a top .

Anahí Berneri
FREE Screening of Alanis: Fri Nov 2 | 7pm
Sat Nov 3 | 10am-1pm

The second masterclass was led by Anahí Berneri, the director of Alanis, focusing on her career and the power of film to explore issues of gender from a realistic, intimate point of view.
Anahí Berneri is a film and theatre director and scriptwriter. Her 2005 feature debut, A Year Without Love, earned her the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Mar del Plata International Festival. Her second feature film, Encarnacion (2007) won the FIPRESCI Prize in competition at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Anahí is a teacher and tutor at the National School of Film Experimentation and Production at the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, INCAA. In 2015 the Argentine Film Directors Association (DAC) honored her work as a director. Alanis is her fifth feature film. 

Jenny Murray
FREE Screening of ¡Las Sandinistas! : Fri Mar 29 | 7pm
Masterclass: Sat Mar 30 | 10am-1pm

Jenny Murray is a filmmaker from Chicago. ¡Las Sandinistas!, her first feature documentary film, premiered in competition at SXSW 2018 where it won a SXSW "Special Jury Recognition" Award. Jenny graduated from Columbia University in New York where she studied Philosophy, Photography, and Latin American Film and Literature. After working as a licensed Associate on Watermill Trading’s stock trading desk in New York, she directed two short films and multiple social satire comedy videos, which have been featured on Twitter by television critic Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker and screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Sandi Tan
FREE Screening of Shirkers Fri Apr 5 | 7pm
Masterclass: Sat Apr 6 | 10am-1pm

Born in Singapore, Sandi published a cult zine called The Exploding Cat at 16 and at 22 became the film critic at The Straits Times, Singapore’s largest newspaper. Then she threw all that away to run off to film school at Columbia University. Her short films Moveable Feast and Gourmet Baby have played at over 100 film festivals including the New York Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand and at venues like MoMA, as well as broadcast internationally on RAI, SBS and ZDF/arte. She was a 2016 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow and a 2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow. She was named one of Variety’s “10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch” of 2018 and one of Indiewire’s “20 Rising Female Directors of 2018.”