Street Heroines is a documentary film on the courage and creativity of female graffiti & street artists from around the world.
Hi, my name is Alexandra Henry and for the past three and a half years I’ve been documenting female graffiti and street artists to capture their collective voice and experiences within the global street art movement- a place where women have received little recognition for their contributions.
| Watch the trailer here: http://bit.ly/1q6sqcg |
While each of their personal stories is unique, their observations clearly reveal the struggle for creative space, and a lack of recognition faced by women working within this male dominated subculture. With more and more women leaving their mark on the movement, Street Heroinespays long overdue tribute to their contributions and reflects a global shift in perspective of who we are as a society.
From Lady Pink, the first woman to paint entire subway train cars in the 1980s, to seminal photographer Martha Cooper whose work legitimized graffiti as an art form, the artists featured in Street Heroines are changing our relationship to the urban environment and the way we interact within the public space. With this project, I’ve had the opportunity to interview women with diverse backgrounds from over 10 different countries, gaining insight through intimate conversations on how their efforts are paving the way for other women to pursue creative dreams.
Now, with the support of our friends and the Kickstarter community, we have the opportunity to look further into their personal transformations through street art by connecting more deeply with specific characters. Weaving together their stories of art and activism we are creating the first of its kind documentary, dedicated to recognizing the female contingent.
With a team in place, Street Heroines will continue to follow artist such as TooFly (NYC/ECUADOR), Magrela (Brazil) and Fusca (Mexico), whose art offers solutions to issues such as gender disparity, sexual harassment and human rights violations. Filming artists who use graffiti and street art to change their local culture, Street Heroines reveals our common ground by sharing their experience, strength and hope. Underscoring the importance of celebrating beauty and creating community, these women also uncover a deeper meaning within our social structure.
The powerful storytelling of Street Heroines highlights an untapped source of cultural and artistic influence. With so much to say about female identity and perspective, this multigenerational documentary aims to empower more women to explore their artistic tendencies and continue to generate social change.
Throughout my journey thus far, I’ve made a series of Street Heroines vignettes that will give you a short glimpse of the artists and their work:
MAGRELA // SAO PAULO
SHIRO // NYC // JAPAN
MISS 1.6.3. // THE BRONX
TOOFLY NYC // ECUADOR
VERO RIVERA // PUERTO RICO
GILF! // BROOKLYN
NUBE // PUERTO RICO
Artists interviewed so far include: ABUSA CREW (Chile) ANARKIA (Brazil) ALICE MIZRACHI(NYC) BLN BIKE (Ecuador) DANIELLE MASTRION (Brooklyn) ELLE (NYC) FIO SILVA(Argentina) FUSCA (Mexico) GILF! (Brooklyn) LADY PINK (NYC) LEGS (Los Angeles) LEXI BELLA (Brooklyn) LILI CUCA (Colombia) MAGRELA (Brazil) MARTHA COOPER(Photographer NYC) MISS 163 (The Bronx) MO (Ecuador) NUBE (Puerto Rico) SHIRO (Japan)TOOFLY (NYC / Ecuador) TXAR (Spain) TYSA (Mexico) VANESSA ROSA (Brazil) VERA PRIMAVERA (Ecuador) VERO RIVERA (Puerto Rico)
From directing to shooting to producing to editing to translating, I’ve been a one woman show for the better part of three years. Now it is time to take the project to the next level and that’s where you, our friends and the Kickstarter community, come in. We aim to raise the minimum of$53K to get to our next steps – finish production, edit a rough cut of the film, and transition into post. We hope you will support the project and join us in ensuring that Street Heroines makes it to the next level!!!
If we surpass our goal we can take our project even further – create amazing animation + graphics, secure a soundtrack for the film made by musicians as diverse as the Street Heroines themselves, license archival footage, complete the color correction + sound design, cover submissions to festivals and additional outreach efforts.
With your generosity we aim to complete the film in early 2017.
> Summer 2016 Finish Shooting
>> Fall 2016 Edit + Finalize Film + Festival Submissions
>>> Winter 2017 STREET HEROINES PREMIERE!!!
As a teenager, I started to photograph layers of architecture, graffiti, and street art that I found in the urban environment. By traveling more over the years, my photography evolved to capture larger compositions of cityscapes, where I combined the same elements my eye was naturally drawn to. For me, graffiti and street art have always told a different story of place and time, allowing us to see our surroundings in a unique way and recognize the voices of those we may never meet.
More photography here.
In 2012 while exploring New York City with my camera, I came across two female graffiti artists spray painting a wall together at the historic 5Pointz warehouse in Queens; Txar from Barcelona and Miss 163 from the Bronx, two women from distinctly different countries collaborating on a wall, using a form of visual communication that transcends language.
Not only did this strike me as such a powerful means of cultural exchange but I instantly identified with the fact that there were few women being recognized in the creative space. Throughout my own career in film and advertising, many times I’ve seen men succeed creatively while female colleagues are relegated to supporting roles and struggle to be heard.
From that day forward my perspective on street art culture changed – I felt inspired to contribute to the movement by finding, documenting, and exposing more women who were creating and expressing themselves in the public space.
Three years, ten countries, and 25 artists later, I’ve discovered a new world where women are pushing the envelope of possibilities and changing our daily human experience in the urban environment!
Alexandra Henry (Director, Cinematographer, Producer) is a multilingual creative producer and emerging director with over 12 years of international experience. She has lived and worked in London, Italy, Brazil, and currently resides in New York City. Her passion for art, music, and languages is showcased through her photography, music videos and on-going documentary project featuring female street artists from all over the world. She has been twice-recognized as a CurateNYC Emerging Artist and her photographs have been internationally exhibited and published in various magazines and online. She speaks Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian and holds a B.A. in Diplomacy & World Affairs from Occidental College- where she was the only woman on the men’s golf team.
Jordan Noël Hawkes (Producer) brings a varied background spanning documentary, commercial film and cultural events to Street Heroines. Jordan’s curiosity for culture and has lead her on many global adventures, rewarding her with personal experience that in turn inspires others to question their roles in society. Having lived in Brazil for six years, she worked closely with the local music scene to produce her own project that looks into the world of Samba, and also produced a series of Brazilian Film Festivals that traveled from Rio de Janeiro to Miami, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and New York. As a talented advocate of perspective-shifting content grounded in storytelling, Jordan now lives in Idaho, where she is the director of Education Outreach for the Family of Woman Film Festival in Sun Valley, and director of Boise’s Filmfort, the film component of Treefort Music Fest. With her understanding of importance of cultural exchange, she also directs a new short documentary series ‘The Human Experience’, which uses music as a means to celebrate the diversity of Idaho’s growing international and refugee population.
Simone Cassas (Editor) is a freelance video editor and filmmaker from São Paulo, Brazil based in New York City. Her editing experience on feature documentaries includes ‘Bounce: How the Ball Taught the World to Play,’ which screened at South By Southwest Film Festival in March 2015 and ‘Woman with a Movie Camera’ which explores why there are so few female directors in Hollywood. She has also worked as an assistant editor on ‘Barbosa The Goalkeeper,’ an episode for ESPN’s 30 For 30 doc series and continues to freelance edit for top production companies like M ss ng P eces. She is currently in development on a personal documentary that explores marriage from the perspective of women, beginning with the birth of marriage as an institution.
The biggest challenge with the independent production of Street Heroines is raising enough funds to hire a team and finish the film in a timely manner. Up until the last six months, I’ve single handedly grown the project to where it is now.
With help from fellow filmmakers, we aim to complete shooting by the end of September this year. To do so we need a small team to conduct the remaining interviews and document the artistic process of artists in Mexico, Brazil and the US. We also need to hire an editor to construct the story from the footage I’ve shot over the past three years and incorporate the new footage we will shoot this summer. Reaching our Kickstarter goal will help us achieve this.
Beyond our immediate goal, we hope to raise even more support that will help finalize our score, pay legal and licensing fees, cover our final sound mix and color correction, apply to film festivals, and get the film ready for our premiere!
We’ve courageously invested our own time, money, and creativity to get the project this far, and it has been an amazing learning experience, both personally and professionally. We are grateful for your support and contributions in helping us celebrate these artists and bring this film to the world!