Naima Ramos-Chapman
CELESTE
HEARD CITY Post Production (sound editing and mixing) Grant
About the project: CELESTE is a short documentary featuring interviews with sex workers in Miami, while the director searches for a woman named Celeste and attempts to makes sense of their meeting. The film explores femme identity, sex work, colonial mentality, and tourism in Miami. It seeks to offer an open space to explore and re-imagine these themes.
About the filmmaker: Naima Ramos-Chapman works to tell stories of transformation and understated bravery by rendering the juxtaposition of psycho-spiritual realities we can not see alongside the normalized brutalities “hiding” in everyday life.
Her first short, AND NOTHING HAPPENED, explored the psychological aftermath of a sexual assault and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival. Her second short, PIU PIU, a meditation on frontier justice and victimhood ontology, premiered at Blackstar Film Festival in 2018. In 2017, she became a Sundance Institute Screenwriter Intensive Fellow. In 2018, she wrote, directed, acted, and edited for the Peabody award-winning Random Acts of Flyness (HBO). In 2020, as part of a multi-media installation produced by Aljazeera Contrast, she wrote and directed STILL HERE, a virtual reality experience about the obstacles black women face who re-enter society after being kidnapped and traumatized by the prison industrial complex. It premiered in the New Frontiers section of the Sundance Film Festival. In 2020, she also co-produced, co-wrote, and story edited the TV series Betty (HBO), a coming-of-age story of a diverse group of young women navigating their lives through the predominantly male world of skateboarding.
Naima is currently in the metaphorical woods developing several projects in the docu-narrative hybrid space that center on BIPOC femmes taking back their power after surviving hierarchical abuses internalised by the dominant social order of white supremacy and toxic masculinity.