This short film will screen with other short films in Block 3 | Celebrating Black Voices
Friday, December 9th at 4pm
Palm Springs Art Museum. Palm Springs, California.
Buy Tickets Here
This short film will screen with other short films in Block 3 | Celebrating Black Voices
Friday, December 9th at 4pm
Palm Springs Art Museum. Palm Springs, California.
Buy Tickets Here
Sculptor Dana King’s hands and activist Fredrika Newton’s memories come together to build a new monument—a bust of Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Huey P. Newton. From the project’s conception through its community unveiling, these two women take us on a journey to reclaim erased histories—personal and collective—and to rededicate them to the future.
A.K. Sandhu, Director/Producer/DOP/Co-Editor
A.K. is a Director, Producer, Cinematographer, and internationally published Photographer. Her film “FOR LOVE AND LEGACY,” about the making of the first monument to honor the Black Panther Party, premiered on the 2022 film festival circuit during Women’s History Month screening at SFFilm, Ashland, Tribeca, BronzeLens, amongst others, and won the Programmer’s Award at Pan African Film Festival. She was also awarded the 2021 Emerging Artist Award in the State of California.
A.K. was chosen as an inaugural fellow of DocNYC/VC’s Storytelling Incubator and Represent Media’s Re-Take Oakland fellowship for emerging BIPOC filmmakers.
She is also the Co-Director, Producer, and Co-DOP of her first feature documentary, SIGN MY NAME TO FREEDOM (in post-production), and in development for her episodic documentary that reveals the neglected stories of women and children of the Black Panther Party and their ongoing work to redefine our cultural narrative through the arts.
A.K. is the founder of Re–Present Partners, a women- and BIPOC-owned, Oakland-based production company that embraces the expansion of how underrepresented communities are depicted in media. A.K. employs documentary filmmaking and photography to revive absent narratives that have been buried or suppressed. Her work crosses into experimental docu-hybrid modes of storytelling, probing themes such as race, gender, spirituality, and cross-cultural solidarity. Inspired by her father’s photographs of their family, A.K. exited a career in finance to pursue her love for visual storytelling. She has earned degrees from Columbia University and U.C. Berkeley, and is a member of A-Doc, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, CineFemme, and Collective of Documentary Womxn Cinematographers. She speaks English, Punjabi, and Hindi/Urdu.
Through this project, For Love and Legacy, I document Black women working to restore the legacy of love that birthed the Black Panther Party (BPP), an organization that worked to directly uplift Black communities during the Civil Rights and Black Power era. Dana King, an ex-News Broadcaster, reborn as an Artist, sets out to sculpt an important part of American history when she is commissioned by Fredrika Newton, to create the first public monument to honor the BPP. Their collaboration takes place in a time when America is energized to reevaluate the stories that monuments are telling and this film follows the journey of two women working to honor the BPP’s vital place in American history. The party contributed to the Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s, and in 2021, their mission to achieve equality for Black Americans remains more relevant than ever. The film highlights that this work continues today by Black womxn who are working to reclaim the cultural narrative through the arts.
