ABOUT US
Dee Hibbert-Jones Nomi Talisman are Academy Award nominated, Emmy® award winning filmmakers for their documentary short film, and internationally recognized artists. Their work incorporates animation, installation, public art and documentary film. Hibbert-Jones and Talisman are Guggenheim Fellows and MacDowell Fellows, and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University awarded them the 2015 Filmmaker Award. Most recently, they were awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition for their “outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice.’, and the California Public Defenders Association 2016 Gideon Award for support to indigent minorities.
Hibbert-Jones and Talismans’ first short animated documentary Last Day of Freedom won Best Short Documentary at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards 2015, a Northern California Emmy 2016 and was nominated for an 88th Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film screened internationally at over thirty international festivals and won twelve festival awards including: Best Short Jury Award at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Documentary Hamptons International Film Festival, Golden Strands Award, Outstanding Documentary Short, TallGrass KS, the 2015 Platinum Award Winner Spotlight Documentary Series, as well as the Award of Recognition at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards and was a CINE Eagle Award Documentary Short Finalist.
Hibbert-Jones & Talisman’s work is in the collections of the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences, the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the DeRosa Preserve, Stanford University, Bennington College , University of North Carolina, University of California, Santa Cruz, ArtsBlock UC Riverside, University of California, Berkeley , Duke University Library, Recology Artist’s Collection and the Savidge Collection at the MacDowell Colony.
Dee Hibbert-Jones website
Nomi Talisman website
LAST DAY OF FREEDOM
When Bill Babbitt realizes his brother Manny has committed a crime he agonizes over his decision- should he call the police? Last Day of Freedom, a richly animated personal narrative, tells the story of Bill’s decision to stand by his brother in the face of war, crime and capital punishment. The film is a portrait of a man at the nexus of the most pressing social issues of our day – veterans’ care, mental health access and criminal justice
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
- Nominee, 88th Academy Awards, Documentary Short Subject
- International Documentary Association (IDA) -Best Short
- Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Durham NC. April 2015
Best Short Jury Award Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award - The Hamptons International Film Festival Best Short Documentary Award
- Tallgrass Film Festival, Wichita, KS, Best Documentary Short Golden Strand Award for Outstanding Documentary Short
- SF Doc Fest, San Francisco CA. June 2015 Best Short Audience Award
- Atlanta Docufest – Best Experimental Documentary Short
- DC Indie Film Fest- Best Documentary Short
- Bar Harbor Film festival – Best Animated Short Documentary
- (In)Justice for All Film Festival, Chicago IL. April 2015
Justice for All Impact Award - 2015 Platinum Award Winner of the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards
- DOK LEIPZIG (Germany): Honorable Mention – Golden Dove International Competition Animated Documentary Award
- Irvine International Film Festival: Honorable Mention – Best Documentary Short Award
RUN WITH IT
RUN WITH IT is an animated documentary film that explores the crisis in the criminal justice system and the U.S. racial divide through the eyes of De’Jaun, a young African- American man on the Dean’s List at Morehouse College guided by the memory of his uncle Troy Davis who mentored him from death row.
In 1989, at the age of 19, Troy Davis was convicted of killing a white police officer in Savannah, Georgia in one of the most controversial and racially charged capital murder cases to go before the courts. Despite bipartisan protest, an international campaign of “too much doubt,” and legal appeals that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Troy Davis was executed in 2011. Now at the age his uncle was at the time of his conviction, De’Jaun looks back, a witness to the overwhelming costs of a biased judicial system, bereft of his closest family, striving to imagine his own future.
Both a factual examination of Troy Davis’ case and an intimate look at the impact of the death penalty on an entire community, RUN WITH IT explores the deep flaws of our criminal justice system, raising profound questions about our democracy, the definition of justice, and our commitment to equality under the law. Through hand-drawn animation of interviews, archival footage, and court documents, as well as animated reenacted scenes, RUN WITH IT weaves the rich personal narratives of De’Jaun and his mother, Martina, who spent 20 years fighting for due process in her brother’s case, together with an unflinching look at the injustices that may have led to the execution of an innocent man.
For updated information please visit the website
http://www.runwithitdoc.net
BLUEPRINT OF POWER
A walk through the city of Zilina reveals how the different architecture in the city is tightly connected to history, politics, and the different regimes that ruled it.
Produced for Frame by Frame, Festival International Animation Festival, Zilina, Slovakia. 2013. Supported by the European Cultural Council
I-140
I-140 explores issues of inequality and civil rights in immigration
policies. We include this project as it explores themes of public/ private lives in ways that are conceptually parallel to our other project – but this time, it is our own personal story. Our interest is to explore methods of coping and to communicate the emotional impact of each individual’s testimony.
I-140 shows the artist-couple holding hand-made signs on the side of highways, describing their seven year-long, $40,000 struggle to keep Talisman legally in the US. The work utilizes static, full body
shots in a landscape/ environment to highlight the powerlessness, passivity, isolation and endless waiting involved in immigration proceedings, as well as the public/ private contradictions inherent in
their situation.
GREEN CARD
Untitled (Green Card) is a follow-up to I-140.
The video is a birds’ eye view, one-shot video showing Hibbert-Jones and Talisman, with their young son, working on a large-scale drawing. As the clip progresses, one sees that the drawing is Talismans’ newly issued Green card. This is a 4:00 minute excerpt
CONSUME YOUR FEARS
In 2009, we created the project Consume Your Fear, originally for Subversive Messe in Linz, Austria, as an installation and a service to participating audience. This video was produced for an installation at ARGEKultur festival “Angst macht Dumm!” at Salzburg, Austria, later that year.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROSTHETICS™
Psychological Prosthetics™ uses corporate marketing strategies, self-help language and guerilla tactics to explore the ways people handle emotional baggage in ‘political times’. Created in collaboration with industrial and graphic designers, medical health professionals and the general public, the project investigates ways that culture supports, fuels and suppresses emotions for political ends. Exhibited as street interventions, gallery installations and a series of DVD projects.
In 2005, Psychological Prosthetics™ PP Valise was presented at Millais Gallery Southampton Institute, UK, and public intervention at London,Winchester, Southampton UK, Paris France, Basel, Switzerland, Tel Aviv, Israel, Berkeley CA. In 2007, it was exhibited at the Corporate Art Expo, the Lab, San Francisco, and Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago, as well as public intervention in Chicago.
The video below is an account of PP Valise and Emotional Baggage. It was screened at Screened: the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland, Santa Cruz International Film Festival, Galerija Nova in Zagreb, Croatia, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Germany Newbury Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, WYSPA Art Institute Gdansk, Poland, Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz, CA, Yuma Arts Center, AZ, Subversive Messe, Linz (Austria) and the Ma’abada (The LAb) in Jerusalem, Israel, among others.
Funded by: UCIRA, the University of Chicago, UC Santa Cruz ARI, Feel Tank Chicago, the Contemporary Art Workshop Chicago IL, Linz Cultural Capital and Subversive Messe, Austria.
EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE
Helping you Handle your Emotional Baggage – Psychological Prosthetics™, 2007
In 2007, Emotional Baggage was featured in Pathogeographies, a series of events, public interventions and exhibitions, arranged by Feel Tank Chicago.
Psychological Prosthetics™ provided a range of new services to discretely handle your Emotional Baggage in Political Times. From the 30 second Rant Recorder™ and instant PP Band-aid relief™, to a custom designed suitcases, we explored relationships between emotional health, happiness, consumption and the political state.
Supported by Feel Tank Chicago, the University of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Workshop, IL.
ARE WE THERE YET?
Are We There Yet? is a public artwork and interactive sound installation in two exhibitions at ZAIM gallery and Souzoukukan9001 gallery, Yokohama Japan. The work is an emotional map of stories collected from passengers on Yokohama’s blue subway line. After traveling the Blue Line for a week and collecting stories from each stop, we edited short clips that represented a memory, an anecdote or an account of each station.
Visitors were invited to contribute stories at gallery Souzoukukan9001, check out an MP3 player from ZAIM and travel the subway, or visit the interactive video and sound installation at ZAIM gallery, Yokohama, Japan. See video below for full description of the project, and sample clips
• Custom electronic components & interface, switches, computer, video projector, MP3 player, plexi-glass panels, saw horses, 25’ x 20′