The 2014 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant has been awarded to James Demo for The Peacemaker and RaMell Ross for Hale County. Demo and Ross will present short excerpts from their works-in-progress prior to the screening of the World Premiere of 2013 recipients Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara’s In Country.

Hale County

RaMell Ross

Hale County follows Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two African Americans on the cusp of adulthood. Born in Hale County, Alabama, and raised in the rural moonlight of the historic South, they insist on escaping the rooting of social stratification while managing its trappings. Explored through immersive and restlessly meditative segments and montages, the film is a poem privileging the interstices of their lives and surroundings to translate their experience.

The Peacemaker

James Demo

The Peacemaker takes us from the quiet pillar of intellectualism in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to some of the most dangerous crisis zones on Earth—from Northern Ireland to Kosovo, from Nigeria to Iraq—to chronicle, over five years, the journey of Padraig O’Malley as he works a peace model based on his recovery from addiction.