Filmmakers Collaborative, Inc. receives $500,000 for upcoming documentary film on Lorraine Hansberry

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced $18.2 million in grants for 208 humanities projects. The Filmmakers Collaborative, Inc. will receive a $500,000 Media Projects Production grant to enable production of a documentary film and website on the life and art of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. 

The Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project is an ambitious multi-platform media project, exploring Hansberry’s fascinating and complicated life from the 30s on Chicago’s South Side to swinging Greenwich Village in the 50s, from a heated Manhattan meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy over civil rights in the 60s to an early death from cancer two years later during her second Broadway premiere.

The Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project is a production of The Film Posse and Chiz Schultz, Inc., in association with Filmmakers Collaborative. The LHDP will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lorraine Hansberry’s death by launching their project on January 12, 2015. Throughout that year they will introduce other project components including an interactive website, educational media for students and teachers, and a radio series as well as the documentary film. Producer Tracy Heather Strain notes that most of the NEH funds will go to licensing fees for permission to use material like music, archival photographs, and film and news clips.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

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