Each month, our Spotlight showcases the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities.
This October, we’re highlighting the important work of Mamá Papaya, an organization dedicated to the art and practice of filmmaking.
Discipline: Filmmaking
MRAC Grant Program: Flexible Support, 2024
About This Grantee
Mamá Papaya is an immigrant-led, nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing and empowering underrepresented filmmakers and storytellers in Minnesota. Their programs provide emerging storytellers and filmmakers with the opportunity to tell their story.
Through the creation and screening of their films, the fellows and their communities engage in a transformative process that fosters deep connections, skill development, and meaningful conversations.
Their fellowships serve as both incubators and accelerators for emerging talent, helping to launch sustainable, long-term creative practices. A well-crafted short film often opens doors to numerous funding opportunities and professional advancements. Their fellows join our vibrant, supportive, creative community that includes established filmmakers and artists.
“At Mamá Papaya, we prioritize care, joy, and community-rooted processes, fostering long-lasting relationships.” —Mamá Papaya
Impact Statement
“MRAC funding supports urgently necessary parts of our organization so we can grow and remain active in our mission to support underrepresented storytellers and filmmakers tell their stories. Our work toward building a thriving film ecosystem that embraces various cultural narratives, histories, and creatives benefits significantly from MRAC grants. We foster change that creates spaces of mentorship, creative healing, skill learning, and community connections. Our current fellowships offer a vital opportunity in the state for underrepresented filmmakers to make their first narrative films and incubate their long-term sustainability. MRAC funding has supported gatherings, screenings, fellowships, productions, and spaces that nourish and vitalize the dreams and journeys of aspiring artists.
In our programs, Mamá Papaya witnesses our fellows transform feelings of deeply seeded creative self-doubt and inadequacy into fierce courage and confidence, proudly calling themselves film directors and creative leaders. After our programs, they lead new projects, screenings, productions, and complex creative collaborations, rippling the impact and helping our communities flourish together. Underrepresented storytellers’ capacity to believe in themselves and their story is part of the impact MRAC and Mamá Papaya create in our communities. When we consider the historical effects of colonialism and white supremacy, which invalidates and erases BIPOC stories, our programs nurture creative leaders that project their voices and counter limiting, divisive narratives.
Another valuable impact supported by MRAC is how the creative process in our programs invite people to find meaning in their own story. When fellows tell and enter their stories again in film, they can move through grief and trauma, and develop more nuanced, complex, and meaningful beliefs. Storytelling and film allow them to redefine who they can be and how they can move through the world, creating a deep internal shift in their ability to reach their goals and capacities to connect in community.
Films can spark conversations, connections, and chances for audiences to see their own story reflected in the big screen, affirming their own experiences and dreams. Our fellows’ films tell others, ‘You are not alone. We are not alone.’ If we can create meaningful relationships and strengthen our communities, we can overcome the crises of our times and see each other through hardships.” —Mamá Papaya
Stay Connected
MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight is a series to showcase the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities. Stay connected with this month’s grantee:
Visit Mamá Papaya’s website to find out more.
Follow them on instagram @mamapapaya.film.
Applications for Mamá Papaya’s Film Sparks Fellowship will open in winter 2024.
