I AM NOT OK - A mother and son respond to the unending killings of Black Americans amidst the backdrop of the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Dance and archival photographs are woven together to evoke fear, outrage, and anger and the need for communities to come together and find solutions. Directed & Edited by Gabrielle Lansner. Narration Written & Spoken by Tiffiney Davis. Starring Pat Hall & Dahsir Hausif

BIO: Gabrielle Lansner - Filmmaker - Choreographer - Writer

Gabrielle Lansner is an award winning filmmaker, choreographer, and producer whose work is influenced by her background in choreography and performing.  Her films have screened at dozens of festivals worldwide and garnered multiple awards.Her latest short film, I AM NOT OK is an experimental dance film inspired by the words of Tiffiney Davis, the Executive Director of the Red Hook Art Project, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The film has screened extensively at film festivals around the world and won Best Experimental Film at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora FF in NYC and Best Cinedance at the Minneapolis St. Paul Int'l FF in MN. 

In 2020, she wrote and directed her first short narrative film, Lullaby to Love. She is also in the early stages of development for her first narrative feature film, STILL LIFE, which she has penned as well.

Her  film, the birch grove, 2015,  had a successful festival run, screening at the Newport Beach Festival, the Cannes Short Film Corner, and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, to name a few. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Experimental Film at the Underexposed Film Festival in Rock Hill, S.C. and composer, Joel Pickard, won Best Original Score from the  International Fine Arts Film Festival in Santa Barbara.

Lansner's, THE STRONGER, 2012, premiered at the Cannes Short Film Corner and screened at over two dozen festivals, including Interfilm Berlin, Festival International du Film sur L’Art Montreal, and the Female Eye in Toronto, to a name a few. Garnering awards worldwide, the film received Best Artistic Director Award from the Lady Filmmakers Festival in LA, the Award of Distinction from the Open Stage Festival in Poland, and was nominated for Best Experimental Film at the Female Eye Festival and Best Cinematography at the VisionFest Festival in NYC.

Her first short film , DAD, 2010, won the Award of Merit for Experimental Film from the Accolade Competition. It screened at NewFilmmakers Anthology Film Archives/NY, the Baryshnikov Arts Center NY, Newport Beach Film Festival CA, and IN THE PALACE, among others.

For over 30 years, Lansner has explored artistic disciplines moving from pure dance works, to dance/theater, to film. She has always been interested in story and character: creating emotionally complex and layered works that delve into the heart and psyche.

Since 1997, she has been the Artistic Director of gabrielle lansner & company, a critically acclaimed dance/theater company based in New York City. The works have been produced at The Peter Jay Sharp Theater, HERE, River to River Festival, P.S 122, The Joyce Soho, to name a few and have toured the US and Canada. The company has received support from The Dance Films Association, The Alvin & Louise Myerberg Foundation, The Harkness Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, Altria, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and The Field.

The company’s varied explorations include delving into the lives of Holocaust victims in the literary works of Bertolt Brecht and Cynthia Ozick, exploring adolescent yearning in Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding”, examining the nature of forgiveness in a work inspired by the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and celebrating the life of pop icon Tina Turner in their original musical RIVER DEEP. TURNING HEADS, FROCKS IN FLIGHT, a site-specific dance performed at Battery Park City, was produced by Sitelines 2009/LMCC as part of the River to River Festival.

Other creative projects include choreographing the musical play “Shangri-La” for Queens Theater in the Park, for which she received an Innovative Theatre Award nomination for Best Choreography, “Cyrano de Bergerac” for Lehman College, Paul Scott Goodman’s musical “Him and Her” for the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival, Nancy Magarill’s musical “The Boy with the Glasses” at New York Theater Workshop.

Lansner has also choreographed episodes of Law & Order: SVU, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

She is a member of SAG, New York Women in Film and TV,  the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, is a former  Board Member  of the Dance Films Association/DFA, NYC  and was instrumental in developing PS 122 in NYC as a rehearsal and performance space.

"Infused with an eerie Gothic edginess, Gabrielle Lansner’s “the birch grove” paints a somber yet lovely picture of loss, love, and redemption. There’s a clean, sensitive elegance to both its evocative, emotional movements and beautifully framed scenes."

- Newport Independent

“Lansner has a gift for creating vivid dramatic landscapes out of an almost seamless merging of text and movement.”- The New York Times

Leveling Lincoln is a 2024 Daytime Emmy Award Winning film that explores the history behind the landmark 1961 desegregation case of Taylor vs. Board of Education of New Rochelle, NY where an entire elementary school had to be torn down to achieve a level playing field in education. The case, the first of its kind in the North (seven years after Brown vs. The Board of Education), was praised on the floor of the United States Senate as an example of successful integration by peaceful protest, discourse, and jurisprudence. In its wake New Rochelle leveled the school. A new school was never built and the vacuum created in the Lincoln Avenue community remains today.

In contrast to the Ruby Bridges or the Linda Brown stories in the South, the New Rochelle case had hundreds of children bussed to schools without calling out the National Guard. All because of a group of dedicated parents who took action. They knew their children were being given an inferior education in a city that prided itself on its diverse school population. And they did something about it. Intended and unintended consequences spill out in every interview. They reflect upon their own children and grandchildren as they worry for their future.

It's also a story of how a community came together at the grassroots level to reject the accepted de facto segregation of their town (due to red-lining) and recognize how its history of privilege made them blind to systemic inequality. It's a story of historical national importance that attracted the attention of figures like Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, the NAACP and CBS' Mike Wallace. Ultimately, we analyze the problems and solutions that the New Rochelle School District dealt with and glean what lessons can be learned and applied to today's equally challenging educational issues.

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Directed and Produced by Arden Teresa Lewis of AT LEWIS Films LLC. Produced in association with Tinks Lovelace of BAG O' BONES Collective

BIO: Arden Theresa Lewis

Arden has performed, directed and produced on both coasts and a few states in between.  She has raised two children in Los Angeles, and taught in LAUSD for the past 19 years. She and her husband Charlie Mount have made a partnership in the arts for over 30 years.

Arden's current project is distributing the Daytime Emmy and Telly award winning documentary film, Leveling Lincoln - a Civil Rights story of elementary school integration - NOW ON THE PBS APP https://www.pbs.org/video/leveling-lincoln-wmrarj/  (See www.levelinglincoln.com for more information).  

In 2022, Leveling Lincoln took home 9 Festival Awards and now will be available on PBS and InfoBase Educational programming.  Arden's short films have been screened at the Long Beach Indie Film Festival and the Shorts Off Festival in London among others.  She has earned several awards for playwriting, including the Lillian Nesburn/Julie Harris award for playwriting (1995) for her play, Grandma Good . She has been published twice by Heineman Press in Scenes For Women By Women and More Monologues By Women. She and husband, actor-director-writer-magician, Charles Mount, are members of Theatre West. Her play Baby Dreams was produced on a grant from Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department at Theatre West in 1994 and her play Little Rhonda has had productions in New York City, at Theatre Geo in Los Angeles, and had the honor of being included in the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater’s archival collection of new plays of 1995. Her plays for children include, The Movie Star's New Clothes, Once Upon a Time Out!, The Girl Who Cried, Martian! and It's Elementary School, Watson!, which she co-wrote with her husband, Charlie Mount.

In New York, she appeared Off Broadway in Joe Pintaro's Wild Blue and was a member of New Voice Theatre, Drama Project, and Madison Avenue Theatre Projects. Her regional theatre credits include, Jennifer in Paint Your Wagon at the La Mirada Civic Theatre, Inherit the Wind under the guidance of Jerome Lawrence at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, two full seasons of lead contracts at Surflight Summer Theatre in New Jersey as well as tours of Barnum and Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

In Los Angeles, Arden has appeared as Nancy in Theatre West's Chestnuts Production of Edward Albee's Seascape, Doug Haverty’s Come Baby Cradle and All, and the late Sherwood Schwartz’s Rockers.

Her current theatrical home is Theater West in Hollywood, where she has performed, produced, and served as Artistic Moderator and Writers Moderator for their acting and writing workshops for over 20 years. She directed their world premiere productions of  Walking in Space, and A Thorn in the Family Paw,  by Garry Michael Kluger. Also, The Night Forlorn, or Waiting on Godsford by Steve Nevil, winner of the 2018 Valley Theatre "Best Play" Award, for which she was also nominated as "Best Director". Kimberly Woods of DAYBREAK INDEPENDENT.