For Love And Legacy, Short Doc by A.K. Sandhu

A STORY OF LOVE, ART, AND ACTIVISM

A FILM BY A.K. SANDHU

SYNOPSIS

This film follows the journey of two women working to honor the Black Panther Party's vital place in American history. Dana King, an ex-News Broadcaster, reborn as a Sculptor, now casting Black bodies in bronze. Activist Fredrika Newton, widow of Dr. Huey P. Newton, former Black Panther Party member, and Co-Founder/President of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, established to preserve and share the true legacy of the Black Panther Party.

FOR LOVE AND LEGACY is a short documentary that explores a nexus of art, race, and legacy through the personal journeys of King and Newton. We follow King as she sets out to sculpt the first-ever public sculpture to honor the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Dr. Huey P. Newton. King and Newton allow the camera to document the creation process of this important sculpture and their collaboration takes place in a time when America is energized to reevaluate the stories that monuments are telling.

The film blends intimate verite scenes between King and Newton with the meditative sculpting process, juxtaposing macro close-ups and wide shots with personal family archives. We will see King create art within her personal studio and living space and the film will end with a verité scene of the dedication ceremony revealing the public art installed in West Oakland.

The central question in the film is “How do Black womxn feel about distorted narratives of their past and how are they working to reclaim them today?” We will address this question by exploring the personal stories of Newton and King. Additionally, it is a poignant and personal consideration of the 2020 movement to replace monuments of oppression with monuments of justice.

Synopsis

About

Filmmaker: A.K. SANDHU

A.K. is a rising filmmaker, recovering corporate employee, and a mediocre yogi. She is the founder of Re–Present Partners, a womxn and BIPOC owned, Oakland-based production company that embraces the expansion of how underrepresented communities are depicted in media. A.K. tells stories that tackle the complexities of our perceived differences and inspire deeper understandings about human connections. Inspired by her father’s photographs of their family, she exited a career in finance to pursue her love for visual storytelling.

A.K. employs documentary filmmaking and photography to revive absent narratives that have been buried or suppressed. Her work crosses into experimental docu-hybrid modes of storytelling, probing themes such as race, class, spirituality, and cross-cultural solidarity. A.K. has been awarded the 2021 Emerging Artist Award in the State of California. She is currently a fellow in DOC NYC/VC’s 2021-2022 Storytelling Incubator, a global mentorship initiative, and was selected as part of the inaugural cohort for Represent Media’s Re-Take Oakland 2019–2021 film fellowship for emerging BIPOC filmmakers.

She is the Co-Director, Producer, and Co-DOP of her first feature documentary, Sign My Name To Freedom (in post-production), and in development for her first episodic sports documentary.
A.K. is also developing this short into a larger project that reveals the neglected stories of womxn and children of the Black Panther Party and their ongoing work to redefine our cultural narrative through the arts.

A.K. has earned degrees from Columbia University and U.C. Berkeley, and is a member of A-Doc, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, CineFemme, and Collective of Documentary Womxn Cinematographers. Her work has been supported by California Humanities, Berkeley Film Foundation, Bay Area Video Coalition, East Bay Artists Fund, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Center for Cultural Innovation.