The documentary Banished, co-produced by CIR, explores how slavery and racism reverberated into 20th-century America with the violent removal of black families from their communities from the 1860s to the 1920s. Banished will be broadcast as part of PBS Independent Lens in February 2008.

An open call from WGBH Lab and National Black Programming Consortium invites filmmakers and other aspiring media-makers to pitch ideas for video shorts (of approximately three minutes) looking at the issue of how we resolve past wrongs, especially around matters of race. Pitches might explore themes of belonging versus expulsion, anger versus forgiveness, guilt versus reparations. A successful pitch offers a new approach to story-telling and presents a surprising visual style, a fresh genre or a unique voice.

Selected pitches will receive production funding and editorial support. Finished shorts may be presented in conjunction with WGBH’s and PBS’s African American History Month programming in February, via broadcast and broadband. The Lab will also consider completed shorts (rather than only preliminary pitches) that address these themes.

Learn more about this project on the NBPC website. For more information contact Stefanie Koperniak at 617-300-5317 or stefanie_koperniak@wgbh.org.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.