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from the MediaAction website

Two Nikolai students to attend festival and workshop with Charles Burnett

11.17.2010. The Anchorage Museum is sponsoring two youth filmmakers from Nikolai, Alaska to fly to Anchorage to participate in a special workshop with MacArthur Fellow award-winning filmmaker Charles Burnett during the Anchorage International Film Festival! The students will have the opportunity to attend the grand opening of the festival, take part in a hands-on workshop with Charles Burnett, and attending the screening of A Portrait of Nikolai. Joricha Thomas and Patricia Alexia will represent the youth filmmakers from Nikolai who worked collaboratively to create A Portrait of Nikolai:

Joricha Thomas is 19 years old, Yup’ik, and grew up in Nome until she moved to Nikolai two years ago with her daughter, Jasmine. She loves to bead which she learned from her Mother, and her other hobbies include volleyball, reading to her daughter, volunteering, and her favorite subject at school is science. Joricha was a quick learner in the Media Action / Atheneum film workshop and also volunteered to share some of her life story for the film. She enjoyed the workshop and “liked that the community and youth got together, and we were learning something new as a group.” She can’t wait to learn more about filming, and has a special interest in the shooting process.

Patricia Alexia is 16 years old and grew up in Nikolai, an Upper Kuskokwim Athabascan village with 90 residents. Her hobbies include learning American Sign Language, beading, and reading Shakespeare, and she displayed great talent in filmmaking composition and subject choice during the Media Action / Atheneum film workshop in Nikolai in the summer of 2010. Patrica says that she “likes the way the workshop brought us kids together to do something fun and good.” She loves to wonder about how the final movie would look while she is filming, and doesn’t want to stop learning and “experimenting with her mind” through film.

Special thank you to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and congratulations to Nikolai’s youth.