"Box of Sun" Film Fundraiser

Hello! My name is Lileana Pryde Davis Moore and a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker from Chicago, IL. I'm fundraising for a film project very near and dear to my heart, which I began in 2018. "Box of Sun" is a film adaptation of the 4 book poetry series by Joe Pintauro called "The Rainbow Box." It is a meditation on my Black life, ancestral memory, the singularity which unites us all and our responsibility to the Earth from which we were born.

We tell this story through a series of vignettes, inviting diverse cinematographers and artists from all over Chicago to participate in the film's design. This project is largely an effort to unite Chicago's visual art communities with its film art communities. We are working to find creative methods of collaborative storytelling and create new access points for makers to showcase their work in a format they may not already have access to.

This project has been a long time coming. It started as a way for me to find & express my own creative voice and is growing to this grand communal experiment in finding a more holistically rewarding way to profuce film. Filmmaking that feels good for everyone who works on it, that highlights each individual's strengths, that showcases each voice that collaborates on it in big or small ways. We have a small core team of young filmmakers dedicated to making this project a reality, including Producer Mason Bendetti, Camera & Lighting artists Steven Garcia and Donijah Collier, Art department extraordinare Natalie Bonanno, and many other talented and generous folks who have helped out in so many capacities. This film belongs to every hand that touches it.

Your support in this campaign will go toward building our elaborate character costumes for some of the more outta this world characters in the film. It will help us to begin some of the commissions on the incredible art objects that will go into the design of this film. It will go towards shooting some of the first longer form sections of footage. It will help us to get the ball rolling on this project in a very big way. There have been many times where I have felt that this kind of work is impossible. We've faced a pandemic, uprisings, and massive economic upheaval since this idea came to be, but we have managed to keep the flame alive through it all. I cannot wait to screen this film for the first time in Chicago, but I am even more excited for the process of this making, which continues now. Your support, big or small, whether you can share or donate, makes it all real. Thank you for reading, I can't wait to make this with you all. <3