Three Alumni Selected for Hillman Grad Productions and Indeed's Rising Voices Program

By
Daniel Beltis
May 07, 2021

Three alumni were selected to participate in Hillman Grad Productions and Indeed's Rising Voices program. They are: Johnson Cheng '20Dre Ryan '05, and Shelly Yo '18. The program is helmed by Lena Waithe, and selects ten BIPOC filmmakers debuting their films at the Tribeca Film Festival. Under the companies’ “Rising Voices” partnership, the filmmakers have been awarded a $100,000 production budget and crew (via Hillman Grad and 271 Films) to produce a 15-minute short film.

Executives from Hillman Grad Productions, Indeed, Ventureland and PRETTYBIRD filmmakers and program mentors Calmatic, Paul Hunter and Melina Matsoukas selected the 10 winning screenplays from over 850 applications.

“Whenever I talk to up and coming filmmakers they always tell me finding money is the biggest hurdle they face. That’s why I’m so grateful to Indeed: Rising Voices, for helping us give ten filmmakers both money to make their films and mentorship while they do it,” Waithe, Hillman Grad’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the selections.

In addition to the $100,000 production budget and dedicated line production crew, each filmmaker has been awarded a $10,000 writing fee and access to an additional $25,000 COVID budget to ensure the safety of the cast and crew. Indeed will offer at least one winning filmmaker an additional $75,000 budget to create new work for the company as a non-exclusive filmmaker-in-residence.

Johnson Cheng is an award-winning Chinese American writer/director hailing from the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County. His films have screened at over 100 international film festivals, including Tribeca, TIFF Kids, Reykjavík (Golden Egg Selection), Nashville, Florida, Cinequest, Uppsala, Giffoni, Short Shorts Tokyo, and Palm Springs (Best Student Film Award). Johnson is a recipient of the prestigious Princess Grace Award (Cary Grant Film Award) and the AT&T InspirASIAN Student Film Award. He is an alumnus of the New York Film Festival Artist Academy, Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium, Reykjavík Transatlantic Talent Lab, Short to Feature Lab, Visual Communications’ Armed With a Camera Fellowship, and Columbia University’s MFA Film Directing/Screenwriting program. Johnson is a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild.

Dre Ryan is currently an executive producer and co-creator of Apple’s limited series Lady In The Lake, and is an executive producer and supervisor for HBO Max’s series The Players Table, both of which hail from Endeavor Content. Ryan’s other notable television credits include The Man in the High CastleThe Exorcist and The Bridge. Ryan is directing her first film, Cinephile, starring Stephanie Allynne and Dinah Shihabi that will premiere at Tribeca Film Festival, through Indeed and Hillman Grad’s Rising Voices program, for emerging and underrepresented directors.

So Young Shelly Yo is a first generation Korean-American director, screenwriter, editor and visual creative from Southern California. Her shorts have screened at renowned film festivals around the world. Her recent short Moonwalk with Me was a finalist for HBO’s APA Visionaries competition and was granted AT&T’s InspirASIAN Film Award (CAAM) and Best Student Film (Dead Center Film Festival). Shelly is a recipient of SFFILM’s Sloan Filmmaker Fellowship, VC Media’s AWC Fellowship, a two time finalist for Tribeca's Through Her Lens Filmmaker Program and the Athena Screenwriting Lab. She is also a 2nd rounder for the Sundance Development Lab in 2020 and a finalist for the SFFILM Westridge Grant in 2020.