WeOwnTV
Banker White is a multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco. His projects have been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Tribeca Film Institute, Impact Partners, LEF, Britdoc, the Catapult Film Fund, The Fledgling Fund, the California Council for Humanities and the Pacific Pioneer Fund.
Artist BioWeOwnTV launched its first program in Sierra Leone by facilitating a month-long filmmaking workshop for 18 young men and women just outside the capital city Freetown. For the inaugural class of WeOwnTV: Sierra Leone, workshop participants were selected based on the enthusiasm, eloquence and sense of purpose each of them exhibited during the interview process. Many participants had never had a camera or touched a computer and many had not finished school, but they each demonstrated an incredible strength and resolve in overcoming tragic circumstances. The aspiring filmmakers came from all areas of the country: the diamond-mining district of Kono, the dusty small town of Makeni (a rebel stronghold druing the war) and from the hardscrabble slums of the country’s capital city, Freetown. WeOwnTV provides continued technical support, encouragement and training that will allow these young adults to produce media, and share their creative voice with the world.
From the Journal
Who tells the story about a particular community is important, and sometimes it’s a matter of life and death. The team working at WeOwnTV, a media learning center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, learned this first hand when they found themselves in the middle of the Ebola crisis in 2014.
Banker White
San Francisco, CA
Banker White is a multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco. His projects have been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Tribeca Film Institute, Impact Partners, LEF, Britdoc, the Catapult Film Fund, The Fledgling Fund, the California Council for Humanities and the Pacific Pioneer Fund. He is the director/producer of the documentary The Genius of Marian which is an intimate and courageous portrait of his mother Pam White's struggle with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The film premiered at the Tribecca Film Festival and will be broadcast on PBS's award winning series POV in September 2014. Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (POV 2007), which tells the remarkable story of a group of six Sierra Leonean musicians, was nominated by the IDA for best feature in 2006; won grand jury awards at AFI Fest, Full Frame Film Festival and Human Rights Watch Film Festival; and earned audience awards at SXSW and Miami International Film Festival. It was broadcast on POV in North America, HBO Latin America and NHK in Japan among others. Banker also founded WeOwnTV, a collaborative filmmaking and storytelling project based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Anna Fitch, daughter Dylan and son Oscar. Banker received a BA from Middlebury college in 1995 and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2000.