My Mom, The Scientist is a personal essay-style film about the filmmaker’s Mother, Rudean Leinang – a chemistry professor and activist who taught and researched at Bronx Community College for 30-years. Born in the Bronx in 1937, Rudean was part of the first generation of Black scientists who were able to access jobs and opportunities that the Civil Rights Movement opened up in the United States. She found a love for chemistry, and science would become an integral part of her life and the lives of those she touched. What lessons can we learn from Rudean’s story in the face of a declining number of BIPOC students entering STEM fields and an era marked by national mistrust of science? The film will combine personal stories of contemporary and historical Black scientists using verité and archival footage, humor, user-generated clips, home movies, animation, and Harris’s previous filmography to examine the seldom told story of the challenges and untapped potential around African American participation in the sciences.
My Mom, the Scientist is anticipated to release 2025. Learn more at mymomthescientist.com
Scientists In The Family is an ongoing, multi-pronged project that uses community roadshows to source and highlight science stories in Black families; and social media video to both distribute (call) and inspire user-generated media content (response). In the interplay between the roadshows, videos and UGC media, we are co-creating a space to explore Black futures in science and technology. SiTF will tell the story of Black scientists, who are working at the intersection of climate change, pandemics, hunger, water shortages, etc. – finding the answers to ancient questions among the stars and in the deepest oceans. They are not rock stars or starting quarterbacks. They’re not famous … but they should be. And in bringing out their stories, we will inspire new generations to follow in their footsteps.
Good Morning Buffalo creatively integrates elements of legal drama, investigative journalism and social realism with documentary, autobiography and the family archive. The film is a quest for justice, accountability, and healing in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Top’s Grocery in May 2022 that left 10 Black community members dead. After the shooter has gone to trial, the question is: who else is responsible for this crime? This film explores whether unmediated social media algorithms are criminally responsible for radicalizing this young man, and the degree to which deep-seated and historical racist fears are rampant online, and are used to foment violence.
The story focuses on a landmark legal case against both the gun industry and social media companies, wherein surviving family of victims claim that these entities were instrumental in enabling violence. The film follows survivors of this mass shooting in the East Side of Buffalo, a Black community, and features family members, first responders, and many members of the surrounding community–just blocks away from the store, who remain impacted by the tragedy. The film asks: how do communities seek justice and accountability while trying to heal? We enter the community through an African-American father-daughter legal team, John Elmore and Kristen Elmore-Garcia, who are themselves survivors of a parallel trauma: one of the first racialized mass shootings which occurred in the Buffalo region in 1974, in which John’s father was shot, sending the family spiraling into poverty.
