Over the past nine years, Quad Cities students with the Urban Exposure Independent Film Project have amassed a filmography equivalent to a small studio.
“I think that we have 30-something films that we’ve made,” said Gaye Shannon Burnett, co-founder of the Azubuike African American Center for the Arts. “The kids that go to film school usually go with the film, and it puts them ahead of the game because — you’d be surprised how many people enter undergraduate film degrees with no films.”
Films are crafted during Urban Exposure’s annual Summer Film program, and the main public showcase for students’ short films is Urban Exposure Film Night. Typically scheduled for November, this year’s Film Night is now set for Davenport’s Figge Art Museum on Dec. 19 at 5 p.m. Another change is that, rather than premiering multiple short films, this year’s batch of students will focus their time on one project.
“You’ll only see one new film this year, but we’re also showcasing a few previous years — especially a few of them that didn’t get as much exposure because we were just coming out of COVID,” said Shannon Burnett, noting the changes for this year as mostly having to do with the readiness of the scripts.
As of reporting, students are still in the pre-production stage for the new short film.
Still, Azubuike African American Council for the Arts (the organization Urban Exposure is subordinate to) will still have a November event at the Figge. The organization will screen Standing Strong: Elizabeth Catlett for free on Nov. 9. This Davenport screening will invite the filmmakers for a talk back. The film, which reminisces on the life and impact of the first Black woman to earn an MFA at the University of Iowa, has another showing at the Des Moines Art Center on Nov. 19.
This past summer, Urban Exposure also launched its very first film festival: The Pulling Focus African American Film Festival of the Quad Cities.
“We thought it was just going to be regional, at best, and it ended up being international,” said Shannon Burnett. “We got films from all over the place. One girl flew in from Columbia. People came down from New York and Atlanta.”
The goal of the new festival is to spotlight shorts from filmmakers of the African Diaspora for local audiences.
This year’s inaugural festival showed 35 short films. Shannon Burnett said she’s already in the process of arranging the 2024 festival, and hopes to partner with the Last Picture House — the soon-to-open downtown Davenport cinema owned by filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods — sometime in the future.
“We’re going to talk to them about being a venue maybe for something to do with the film festival as well and just seeing where that fits with their schedule,” she said.
It’s not just festivals and student programming that Shannon Burnett is planning. She’s also been gradually laying the groundwork to make sure that the program can exist beyond her.
She recalled Nate Lawrence, the Quad Cities jazz musician who passed away earlier this year at the age of 80. During his life, Lawrence co-founded Polyrhythms/Quad City Jazz Festival and kept programming running through the end of his life.
“I’ve been knowing him for 50 years and he was here at my studio that Saturday before he passed,” she remembered. “We think it was a heart attack, it was terrible. So I’m hoping that’s not going to be my story. It was sudden and it left the organization scrambling because he was [the only one] running it and managing it….
“I’m trying to distribute some of the weight so the organization can remain healthy and it’s time for me to look toward the future and make some kind of plan so that it won’t just dissolve or disappear.”
Though her son Jonathan Burnett is the program founder and creative director for Urban Exposure, he’s also an independent filmmaker currently based out of Los Angeles. Shannon Burnett’s hope is that, in the next five years, she can hire someone to step into the role of executive director full time. Then her marquee project, which has survived a flood and a global pandemic, can persist.
To find out more about the Urban Exposure Independent Film Project, visit azubuikearts.org. Those interested in viewing the short films created in previous years through the project can find them on Urban Exposure’s YouTube channel.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2023 issue.
