CRYSTAL KAYIZA
THE GARDENERS

Pre-production grant: funds will support travel expenses for a production trip, to spend more time with our central characters.

The Project: The Gardeners follows the Worthy Women of Watkins Street, keepers of one of the oldest Black cemeteries in Mississippi, as they preserve the memory of Black life in Natchez. (Documentary).

 
The Filmmaker: Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” her work focuses on pursuing more nuanced storytelling about the African Diaspora. She is a recipient of the 2017 Jacob Burns Film Center Woman Filmmaker Fellowship and the 2018 Sundance Ignite Fellowship. As a Woman Filmmaker Fellow she directed and produced, Edgecombe, a short documentary examining the ways trauma repeats and reinvents itself in a rural Black community in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. The film premiered at the 2018 BAMcinemaFest, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and screened at MoMA as part of The Future of Film is Female: Part 2.

After graduating from Ithaca College in 2015 with a degree in Documentary Studies and Production, Crystal spent two years at the ACLU working on racial justice and criminal justice issues. Her documentary work and writing has been featured in The Nation, Scalawag Magazine and OkayAfrica. She received a Heartland Emmy Award in 2012 for her film All That Remains, which profiles Boley, Oklahoma, one of the nation's last all-Black towns.

Twitter: @c_kayiza
Instagram: @ckayiza7