Sisa Bueno

Originally from New York City, Sisa Bueno is a Black Indigenous Latina film & multimedia maker who is dedicated to exploring powerful ripple effects within humanity while making seemingly inaccessible stories more accessible to audiences. She studied both film production and interactive technologies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). Sisa spent years filming Indigenous and Afro-Latine social movements in South America and completed a short film for Aljazeera/AJ+ related to Afro-Bolivian constitutional movement called "Afrobolivianos Presente." The NBC Network named Sisa a Latino Innovator for her work in Bolivia, and she is a recipient of ITVS- PBS Open Call, Sundance Documentary Fund, International Documentary Association (IDA) Pare Lorentz grant, Firelight Media Lab Fellowship, and most recently the Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellowship for her current work in progress, For Venida, For Kalief. Sisa was also a 2018-2021 Member of the NEW INC tech incubator program within the New Museum working with Augmented Reality (AR) to create new modes of storytelling with more tech integration. She is also currently an Adjunct Instructor at her alma mater, Tisch-NYU.

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ABOUT FOR VENIDA, FOR KALIEF

Kalief Browder is known as the teenager who was sent to Rikers Island for allegedly stealing a backpack– perpetually awaiting a trial that never came. After three years of solitary confinement, in 2015 he committed suicide at age 22. A year later, Kalief’s mother Venida died from a broken heart. Leaving behind her personal collection of poems, the film presents Venida’s words as poetic cinema that showcases the full spectrum of everyday life for people of color in New York City; reveling in lyrical moments of Black and Brown joy and spirituality, as well as constant police surveillance and struggle. The film also lyrically weaves together the deeply personal emotions of Venida’s poems with the verité vignette scenes of activism and restorative justice reform that emerged in the aftermath of Kalief’s death. Featuring those that are inspired by Kalief in life (and in death) as they take part in the markers of his legacy— the naming of streets, the creation of scholarships and foundations, as well as city and statewide legal achievements, the film crescendos/expands to the larger struggle to permanently close Rikers Island, which ultimately confirms how powerful and everlasting Kalief Browder's legacy has truly become.

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