About the partners
The people bringing I LOVE BOOSTERS to Durham
Duke Cinematic Arts presents this three-day program in partnership with echo. The partnership with echo is made possible by a generous grant to Duke Cinematic Arts by the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation, supporting collaborations between Duke and Durham. Duke co-sponsors include Duke Cinematic Arts, the Experimental Film Lab at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and Duke’s Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. The screenings are presented through Screen/Society, Duke’s free public film series, with the film provided courtesy of NEON.
Individually, these organizations fund films, teach them, screen them, distribute them, and pay young people to make them. Together, they are working towards a unified vision of increasing the support available to entrepreneurs and creative businesses in this community, and building the infrastructure that lets them stay and scale here. Three days with Boots Riley is one visible expression of that work, which will continue to scale in the coming years.
Co-presenter
Entrepreneurial Community Hub of Opportunity (echo)
echo is Durham's hub for multi-generational entrepreneurs, where creatives become or build alongside entrepreneurs. Through its podcasting and videography studios staffed by local creative entrepreneurs, working artist incubators, Shiboka magazine, and the Unstuck and Future Founders business and marketing programs, echo helps artists turn their work into income. 550+ entrepreneurs have been involved since 2023. Brunch with Boots is echo's special edition of the Unstuck Series to kick off exciting work with local partners like Duke Cinematic Arts.
Co-presenter · Duke University
Duke Cinematic Arts
Duke Cinematic Arts teaches film inside the humanities rather than apart from them, pairing production with history, theory and the university's global reach. Directed by Shambhavi Kaul, the program offers a major concentration and a minor, sends students west each summer through Duke in LA, and acts as the hub for film life on campus — including the Screen/Society series and the student-run Duke Independent Film Festival.
Made possible by
Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation
The foundation carries the name of one of Durham’s great civic builders. Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (1920–2012), great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, moved to Durham at fourteen and grew closer to the city and to Duke University than any other member of her generation. In 1951 she was one of the first two women elected to Durham City Council, alongside Kathrine Everett, and from 1953 to 1955 she served as the city’s mayor pro tempore. She spent decades as a trustee, vice chair and chair of The Duke Endowment, sat on Duke’s Board of Trustees from 1961 to 1981, and with her husband, Dr. James Semans, helped build the North Carolina School of the Arts, founding its International Music Program in 1967. She was inducted into the North Carolina Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009. Support from the foundation provides free community-wide screenings.
Screening partner
Screen/Society
Screen/Society is Duke's free film series for the whole Triangle, programming theatrical premieres of global and independent cinema alongside international classics, Hollywood genre work and director retrospectives. Its home is the 100-seat Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater, which can project 35mm and 16mm prints as well as 4K digital cinema. Programmed by Hank Okazaki with assistant programmers Archer Boyette and John Winn, and supported by Duke Cinematic Arts and the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. The team and equipment they've generously offered serve as invaluable resources in delivering this experience for the community.
Screening partner
Experimental Film Lab, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Housed at Duke's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and co-directed by Shambhavi Kaul and Franklin Cason, the Experimental Film Lab works to widen who gets counted as an experimental filmmaker, taking on the field's academic biases through a conference, a podcast, screenings and an archival project on African American cinema. Its co-directors are both on stage for the 1:30 PM panel.
Academic partner · Duke University
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Duke's Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies brings studio practice, art history, and visual and media studies under one roof, and collaborates with more than a dozen campus units from the Nasher Museum to the Center for Documentary Studies. It is the academic home of the Cinematic Arts faculty and of the M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Arts, and a standing supporter of Screen/Society's free public programming.
Film provided courtesy of
NEON
Founded in 2017 by Tom Quinn, NEON has become the distributor filmmakers with something to say want to work with. It brought Parasite to its historic Best Picture win, the first for a non-English-language film, and has released five Palme d'Or winners in a row, including Anora. NEON releases more foreign-language films and documentaries than any of its peers, and it is the studio behind I LOVE BOOSTERS.
