Artist
Rebecca Shenfeld

Project Title
Zero Sum

Grant Amount
$1,500

Website
http://rshenfeld.weebly.com

Rebecca Shenfeld plans to make a film about their mothers life, synthesizing documentary and animation. Born in Moscow in 1958, Galina Risis became the leader of her local Communist Youth faction only to move to America to become, for a short time, a QAnon believer. This film will address misconceptions and stereotypes attributed to Russians by Americans and to Jews by Russians, both within the “motherland”, and from the perspective of immigrants and first-generation Americans. It will address the complex connections between nationality, religion, politics and what drives survival and memory. In 1982 when the iron curtain still stood strong, with almost no documentation, no certainty that she would see her parents again and a deep desire to redo her childhood, she immigrated to the USA. Hers is a unique origin story of a conservative, a woman who went through too much. Heartfelt and peppered with stunning animation, it will be a story of poverty dreams and their connections to political ideologies across the spectrum. This film will trace her lifelong relationship to radicalization as a Jewish woman coming from generations of hardship and degradation and how it is progressing.