Sign My Name to Freedom
Click to DonateMission Statement
For over 50 years, Betty Reid Soskin held a secret. Deep in her closet, she’d hidden a box of reel-to-reel tapes with dozens of stunning original songs that narrate her personal journey through the 1960s & 1970s. For decades, she’s been too afraid to confront the emotional baggage that went along with her music, so she buried it away.
With no clear sense for what the future would hold, she decided to open the box and dive back into her songs. That sparked an autobiographical journey to re-explore the personal experiences behind her songs.
Betty’s music is a haunting flashback to her family’s experiences confronting Jim Crow segregation in California. As the first African-Americans to integrate in an all-white suburb of San Francisco, her son survived being stoned by white children, and her family endured daily bigotry that left permanent scars.
The film follows Betty’s journey from the first time she listens to her old tapes, through her collaborations with younger musicians, and culminates with her singing of one of her songs to a crowd of thousands backed by a full symphony orchestra and choir - but only after confronting the deep personal traumas that had kept her from her music for so long.
In collaboration with the next generation of Bay Area Musicians, Betty’s songs converge past & present through their exploration of race, identity, and what it means to be American.
I first met Betty in 2016, and we became close friends through countless conversations without the camera rolling. This relationship has guided the film at every juncture, so that Betty’s voice and take on her life are authentically hers, rather than my interpretation of her story. Back in 2016, Betty hadn't listened to most of her music in decades, but she did have a homemade CD of a few songs she had dubbed from her reel-to-reel tapes years ago. Nobody had taken much notice of her music, including her. As she said, her songs would have gone to the trash heap when she passed away, but when she played a song for me, I was totally blown away. That moment changed both of our lives forever. She entrusted me with her music and her story and that's a responsibility that I take very seriously and promise to uphold. Over the past 7 years, I have helped connect Betty with musicians of many generations from across the Bay Area, and I have always made it a priority to listen to Betty and her family on how I can craft a story that's authentic to their lived experience. Betty, her children, her cousins, and her granddaughter have all given me input on how this story should be told. I hope you'll help me deliver on this promise & fulfill this family's dream.
Betty turned 102 on September 22, 2023. Her icon and mentor was her great-grandmother Leontine, who was born into slavery and passed away when she was 102. Betty's final wish is to see this film and her unreleased music out in the world before she dies. It's what continues to give her meaning now that she has retired from the National Park Service. But given her advanced age, the clock is ticking. That is why time is of the essence for this project.
Principle photography for SIGN MY NAME TO FREEDOM is complete! That means, ninety five percent of the real-life footage of Betty, her family members, and the Bay Area musicians that she worked with has already been recorded. Now we need your help to bring Betty's backstory to life through re-enactments, archival footage and the magic of editing!
We've raised significant funding to get us through shooting and the early stages of editing through a mix of grants & donations from folks like The Berkeley Film Foundation, Rosie the Riveter Trust, California Humanities, Bay Area Video Coalition, Ms. Foundation for Women, & the International Brotherhood of Boilermaker, the labor union that was segregated during the WWII home front, making it impossible for Betty to work as a Rosie the Riveter, but that has since changed course dramatically. We have also received support from private individuals like yourself. But we need your help to get the film 100 percent finished and out into the world.
Thanks to you, our dedicated supporters, we recently raised $97K through our Seed & Spark crowdfund campaign. You breathed life into the post-production phase of this film. We are now deep in the editing process, weaving together themes of Betty’s story with our award-winning editor Kevin Jones and editorial team. But we didn't reach our stretch goal of 150K needed to get to final cut. If we can raise an additional 53K this summer we can get our pay our editor to get us there. With Betty turning 103 in September, we need to raise funds as quickly as possible to prevent any pauses in our work. Any funds raised beyond this will help us:
- Pay for the first dramatic re-enactments for key moments in Betty’s life that were never documented with photos or film. These funds will cover actors, sets and hiring crew.
- Restore and remaster Betty’s music so we can release an album of her unreleased songs along with our documentary.
- Pay a fair wage to a post-production team of young working professionals.
Thank you for making this film possible! We are grateful for any amount you can contribute! Your support makes you more than just a donor, it makes you a partner helping Betty realize her dream of to see her story on screen and her lost music into the world.
YOUR DONATION IS TAX-DEDUCTIBLE!
Your donation to this film is tax-deductible! Sign My Name To Freedom is a fiscally sponsored project of the International Documentary Association (IDA), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions in support of Sign My Name To Freedom are payable to IDA and are tax-deductible, less the value of any goods or services received, as allowed by law. The value of goods and services offered is noted under each donation level. If you would like to deduct the entire donation, decline the incentive at checkout.
HOW TO DONATE BY CHECK
If you prefer to donate by check or through your IRA or Donor Advised Fund (DAF), that is possible too! To make a donation from your IRA or DAF, request that your fund administrator issue a check to the International Documentary Association and be sure that they include "Sign My Name to Freedom 4461" in the check's memo so the funds go to the Betty Reid Soskin documentary. Checks should be mailed to, "IDA, Attention: Fiscal Sponsorship, 3600 Wilshire Bivd., Suite 1810, Los Angeles, CA 90010-2622". If you have questions, please email the film team at [email protected].
Bryan is a director, producer and cinematographer in Oakland, CA. He shoots, directs and often edits his own projects, which range from investigations into the criminal justice system to visual experiments capturing movement and dance. His films are deeply personal explorations of the people in front of his lens, and his camera always seeks to bring viewers closer to his subjects.
Originally from New Mexico, he worked as a bilingual reporter in Albuquerque before earning a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary film program in 2012, where he was awarded the Mark Felt Fellowship for Investigative Reporting. While at Berkeley, he directed, shot and edited Chicago Confessional, a 26-minute documentary film about wrongful convictions and an inmate’s fight for a new trial after 30 years in prison.
His hybrid short documentary, Sickness in the System, which depicts the COVID-19 outbreak in San Quentin Prison using actors, animation and archival footage, was picked up by Field of Vision for distribution and released in 2022. His half-hour dance film, Love, A State of Grace, will premiere at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival in October 2023. He was awarded a National Media-Maker Fellowship by the Bay Area Video Coalition in 2018. He speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese.
A.K. is a filmmaker who directs, produces, and now writes films about female protagonists, the immigrant experience, and new perspectives on history. Probing themes such as race, class, spirituality, and cross-cultural solidarity, she tells stories to bridge the gap between our perceived differences and cultivate a deeper understanding of human connections.
Her debut award-winning film, ALIVE IN BRONZE: Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) screened at festivals like Tribeca, PanAfrican, Mill Valley and beyond before being acquired by MTV Documentaries/Paramount+.
A.K. has been awarded the Emerging Artist Award in the State of California and was the winner of SeriesFest ‘Spotlight Your Town’ Pitch competition by NatGeo and Visible. She was selected as part of the inaugural cohorts for DOC NYC/VC’s Storytelling Incubator and for Re-Take Oakland film fellowship for emerging BIPOC filmmakers.
She is currently in development for a mix of documentary and narrative projects and a docu-series that reveals the neglected stories of women 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 an active member of A-Doc, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, CineFemme, D-Word and Collective of Documentary Women Cinematographers. She speaks English, Punjabi, and Hindi/Urdu
Kevin Jones, Senior Editor
Kevin is an Emmy-award-winning editor whose cut over a dozen feature-length documentaries. His credits include Dave Chappelle Live in Real Life, which had its premiere as the closing night film of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. He also edited the Emmy-winning documentary A Lion in the House, which premiered at Sundance before airing nationally on PBS. His credits also include Burn, the audience award winner at the Tribeca Film Festival and New York Times Critic's Pick.
Sara Lafleur-Vetter is a documentary filmmaker and a photographer with a passion for telling stories of the underdog and the underbelly of society. She believes in the power of film and photography to better the world. Lafleur is inspired by the #decolonizedocs movement and believes media makers have a duty to flip the script of structural inequality, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.
Lafleur holds a Master’s in Journalism specializing in Documentary Film from the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she was fortunate to study under the doc giants Jon Else and Orlando Bagwell. At present, Lafleur is working on a feature-length film about several Indigenous activists who were transformed by their experience at Standing Rock. The film has drawn support from IDA, IFP, and Berkeley Film Foundation. Lafleur was also a 2018 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow.
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