2019 FELLOWSHIP AWARDED TO VICTORIA CHALK
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PHOTO BY HAL HOROWITZ PHOTOGRAPHY
We’re thrilled to announce Victoria Chalk as our newest Schmeer Fellow!
She’s a talented emerging editor who demonstrated an aptitude for balancing investigative filmmaking with nuanced character-based storytelling in her latest feature documentary, Call Her Ganda (Tribeca Film Festival premiere and winner of the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival Grand Jury Award).
Her collaborators have described her as an ideal creative partner who is artistic and thoughtful. She has a strong passion for the craft of editing and we’re looking forward to supporting her as she takes the next steps in her career.
Victoria’s mentors for the year will be Victor Livingston (The Queen of Versailles, Crumb), Azin Samari (The September Issue, Ethel), and Lindsay Utz (American Factory, Quest).
“I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity,” Victoria said. “It’s an honor to receive this award in memory of Karen Schmeer. Not only is her work something to aspire to, but from everything I’ve heard about her, she was a generous, passionate and strong woman who shared her craft with others. She is an inspiration to many young editors looking to hone in on their art. In the coming year I look forward to learning from my incredible mentors, working on films that shine a light on stories that aren’t otherwise in the public eye, and to finding ways of giving back to the documentary community.”
Victoria will receive the fellowship on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 at the SXSW Film Festival Awards Ceremony in Austin, Texas.
ABOUT VICTORIA CHALK AND HER WORK
Victoria is a British-Chinese film editor who has been working in post-production for over 10 years. She grew up in rural France and began her career in Paris where she edited commercials. Yearning to break out of the French film industry and pursue new opportunities, she moved to New York, then to Los Angeles where she cut her first feature, Ovarian Psycos (SXSW, Hot Docs).
She recently edited the riveting feature documentary Call Her Ganda (Tribeca Film Festival premiere and winner of the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival Grand Jury Award). That film’s director, PJ Raval, remarked that “Victoria’s ability to empathize enables her to view the footage through the subject’s own perspective, avoiding the pitfalls of extractive filmmaking or reducing our subjects to victims or ‘others’.”
Her other credits include the narrative short Vivre, jusqu’au bout… (Rhode Island International Film Festival award winner); additional editing on Before You Know It (SXSW); and she is currently wrapping Yu Gu’s feature documentary film A Woman’s Work. In her spare time, Victoria trains and fights as a boxer, and is a core member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-DOC).
Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Pena, who has worked with Victoria on two projects, calls her “one of the most talented young documentary editors I know.”
From Call Her Ganda