Two Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant Recipients Featured in Full Frame 2022

Supporting emerging filmmakers and new voices in the documentary field is essential to Full Frame’s mission. Through programs like the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant, the festival has been able to support emerging artists and has recognized a prestigious collection of first-time filmmakers over the past 15 years, including: Isabel Bethencourt, Parker Hill (Cusp), Bing Liu (Minding the Gap), Jonathan Olshefski (Quest), Matt Yoka (Whirlybird), RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening).

The 2022 line-up features two past recipients of the grant: The Martha Mitchell Effect (dirs. Anne Alvergue, Debra McClutchy) and After Sherman (dir. Jon-Sesrie Goff).

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The Martha Mitchell Effect

By cultivating a close relationship with the press, Martha Mitchell signaled that she was not content to simply play Washington hostess and sit in the background while her husband, John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, made the news. Flamboyant and boldly outspoken, she was as revered by reporters as she was feared by the Nixon administration, who saw her candid commentary as a liability. These tensions reached a breaking point in 1972, in the aftermath of the Watergate burglary, when the prospect of Mitchell revealing the truth threatened to upend the Oval Office—she was actually detained by campaign officials to keep her quiet. Composed entirely of archival footage, The Martha Mitchell Effect lays bare a blistering account of political gaslighting to give voice to a woman who refused to remain silent.

After Sherman

One root of the word gospel means “good telling,” and in After Sherman, the good telling takes the form of a personal essay by multidisciplinary artist Jon-Sesrie Goff. Expressionistic in tone and encyclopedic in scope, the film explores a fragmented and tenuous history of land and legacy that reaches back to the slave trade and resonates through the present day. Questions of time and tragedy, of place and prejudice, reverberate in the film, and the filmmaker lends keen eyes and ears to the depiction of these inquiries through an ambitious palette of visual techniques and a complex sound design. 

As we learn more about the filmmaker’s coastal South Carolina heritage, we also meet his contemplative father, Reverend Norvel Goff, Sr. This stirring, evocative film collects and preserves shared memory and interrogates a fraught history through home movies, ruminative narration, a vivid jazz score, and attentive cinematography that are knitted together as expertly as a Gullah fishing net.