Audience Awards is honored to partner with Zoe Saldana’s BESE to bring filmmakers a funding opportunity of a non-scripted short series.
Pronounced “bee-say,” the name of the digital media company comes from the English word “be” and the Spanish translation “se.” You may know the creator, Zoe Saldana, as the actress, producer, and activist who starred in Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Saldana launched the platform as a way to “encourage mainstream media to evolve so it can better represent what the American public really looks like today versus 80 years ago.” Current American media fails to represent Latinx communities. Despite comprising 18 percent of the U.S. population, just 4 percent of the newsroom workforce are Latinx. Even worse, less than 2 percent of new producers are Latinx countrywide. BESE aims to change this by bringing forward Latinx creators and stories.
“Latinos are a growing community in America, but Latino stories have remained historically marginalized,” Saldana said. “I’m so excited to be leading BESE, a truly uplifting brand that fills a niche for young audiences craving positive portrayals of the modern Latino experience in America.”
“BESE is all about broadening the existing cultural narrative, and this competition is an opportunity for aspiring filmmakers, and really anyone with a compelling idea, to bring a great story to life. It’s free to enter! We’ll help develop it into a multi-episode web series, so think big!”
BESE is hosting a competition on Audience Awards to find a pilot episode to turn into a episodic short-form web series. The theme of the pilot should reflect at least one of the pillars of our content programming: Nation, Culture and Identity. The style and format is open to non-scripted series – documentary, experimental, light-hearted comedy – but the concept should be big enough to become an evergreen series. Although the series should be rooted in Latinx themes, we are open to working with all kinds of filmmakers and hearing their stories about representation and identity as well. However, we are not looking for scripted series with actors in front of the camera.
The competition deadline is Dec. 10. Learn more here. For all competitions, view our Contests page.
