I just heard that Kiri Davis has been selected as the first filmmaker ever to receive the Extraordinary Service Award from the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council for her film A Girl Like Me which was a part of the sixth annual Media That Matters Film Festival. Congrats Kiri!

What happened with the film after the festival makes a great story, so for those who don’t know…

One of the great things about the Media That Matters Film Festival is the way that web streaming of the films allows the word about them to spread farther than most documentary films can reach — and the shining example of this effect is Kiri’s film A Girl Like Me. In her film, she recreated Kenneth Clark’s landmark “Doll Choice Experiment,” in which a group of African American children were asked how they felt about two identically dressed dolls: one black and the other white. Back in the 50s, nearly every African American child in the study chose the white doll for all things positive and identified the black doll with those that were negative. But sadly, the experiment in a Harlem day care center in 2005 produced nearly the same results.

In June of last year, A Girl Like Me began streaming online on our website. Pretty soon word started to spread as people like Tayari Jones (of TayariJones.com) started blogging about the film. She wrote:

Go right now to the Media that Matters Film Festival and watch “A Girl Like Me,” a short film by a Kiri Davis. (It’s about 10 minutes to watch). There are lots of terrific short films on this site by teenaged film makers, but make sure you check out “A Girl Like Me.”… watch it and let’s all meet back here to talk about it.

Word online continued to spread, and in early August the New York Daily News found the film through a Google search and wrote a story about Kiri. This in turn drew the attention of CNN, ABC World News, Good Morning America and a host of major European news outlets, touching off an international debate on the progress (or lack thereof) that Americans have made since Brown vs. Board of Education. Op Eds, including one by Stanley Crouch, appeared in newspapers from New York to Florida, Arizona and California. Hundreds of thousands of people heard about Kiri’s film and tens of thousands of people watched it online, sent it to their friends and made comments on it. This year, Kiri was contacted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund so they could interview her and use the film for a video podcast, she appeared on Oprah in May, and was the winner of the Cosmo Girl Take Action Hollywood Contest. And most recently we got the news about this award from the Minority Media & Television Council, which they give to recognize “the person who, in the past year, contributed more than anyone else in the nation to the cause of diversity and inclusion in the nation’s media and telecom industries.”

So big congratulations to Kiri, and yay for the Media That Matters Film Festival, and to all the filmmakers who want to make a difference –- it’s happening! Keep up the good work!