Nine Emerson Filmmakers Awarded Virgin Unite Fellowship

Nine Emerson students were accepted into the Virgin Unite Foundation Fellowship, which supports student documentary filmmakers. The students screened their work alongside award-winning filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt, in a three-part event hosted last month by the School of Film, Television, and Media Arts (SOF). 

A faculty panel organized by SOF Professor Marc Fields awarded the fellowship to the student filmmakers: Robin Chen, MFA ’25; Zichen Lan ’27; Jing Dong, MFA ’26; Grace Clancy ’27; Qinling Han ’27; Saba Ghasemi, MFA ’26; Tati Chavitage, MFA ’25; Siyang Zhang, MFA ’28; and Fadime Icin, MFA ’28.

“The Virgin Unite Fellowship award broadens the impact of their long-standing support for social impact documentaries by student filmmakers. It also helps to raise the visibility of nonfiction storytelling as a serious artistic pursuit at Emerson,” said Fields. Each of the nine awardees will receive $1,000 in unrestricted funds for their outstanding documentary work.

The April 6-7 event included a screening of each student’s work, and a screening of Schmitt’s essay film, Evidence, about an ammunition and chemical manufacturer and its place in American life and Schmitt’s own family. Schmitt is the recipient of Creative Capital grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and professor of directing at CalArts. 

The screenings were followed by an open lecture, a master class in an undergrad documentary workshop, and a critique of thesis projects in an MFA Production Workshop, all led by Schmitt, who also spoke individually with the students about their projects.

A Sampling of Student Films

Jing Dong’s film, No English In America, critiques the perceived global interdependence between financial success and understanding English. 

The film documents the life of Wei Ding, a Chinese man who has built and run two restaurants in Boston knowing only three English words: “Sorry, no English.” The film expands on Wei Ding’s family life and emphasizes the barriers that language imposes between those whom he loves most, in spite of his economic success.

The soul of the film is pulled from Dong’s own experience writing in her second language during her first couple of semesters at Emerson. “All of a sudden, everyone around me is speaking perfect English, making me question if I can handle this or not,” Dong said. 

In Undigestable, an experimental film memoir by Grace Clancy, the filmmaker both connects with, and detaches from, who she once was, making way for personal growth. 

Clancy said experimenting with visual and auditory elements helped her “run free” with an idea rather than hold herself to a rigid structure. 

She also said she was grateful to her documentary classmates for their support and to the Virgin Unite Fellowship for the resources that will go towards her BFA thesis film. 

In her one-on-one with Schmitt on her upcoming project, Clancy gained some insight on how to approach the unease of interviewing that many documentarians face. 

“I shared that I was a little nervous because these are people I have never met before,” Clancy said. “But she said to really just go into interviews with curiosity above all else. I don’t have to be an expert in what or who I am interviewing, and I can be honest about that, and show how willing I am to learn from them.”