Partners for Health Foundation and the Montclair Film Festival co-presented Community Resilience Shorts during the 2021 Festival.
This short-film program included screenings of Give and Take, an intimate look at the community fridge movement in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Lead Me Home, which captures the experience of some of the 500,000 Americans who do not have a permanent home, from multiple perspectives.
Gareth Smit, the director of GIVE AND TAKE, participated in a Q+A after the film. Mr. Smit was born in 1990 in Heidelberg, South Africa. He studied Philosophy and History at the University of Cape Town. In 2014 he moved to New York to attend the International Center of Photography. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
He has documented issues relating to migration, race and identity with a particular interest in the role of land and history in shaping the present. In 2014 he documented the community and family of Eric Garner after he was killed by a NYPD police officer, resulting in the photo essay and short film In Tompkinsville. He continued working on Staten Island for two more years culminating in North Shore (Alice Austen House Museum, 2016). In 2018 he received a grant from the Magnum Foundation to collaborate with Tohono O’odham poet Dr. Ofelia Zepeda and historian Martín Zícari for The Place Where Clouds Are Formed (Tucson Museum of Art, 2020).
In 2015 his interests began to shift toward cinematography. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker. He camera operated on Crime + Punishment, Stephen Maing’s 2018 documentary that received a Jury’s Award at Sundance.
Click here to view the 2021 Film Festival Guide.
