The Sunflower County Film Academy (SCFA) is a young filmmaker's workshop that is part of the K-12 Educational Curriculum for the award-winning film, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America.

That film documents the efforts of the Mississippi-sharecropper-turned-civil rights advocate and her humanitarianism in the Delta in the 1960s and 70s. A native of Sunflower County, Hamer was also a fierce proponent of education, and brought the first Head Start program to Mississippi in the mid-1960s.

A STEM program, the SCFA continues Hamer’s mission of providing educational and job opportunities for young people in the Delta. The workshop was designed to introduce more students of color to the Digital Media field and career opportunities in the entertainment industry. Students work with instructors, who are also professional filmmakers, to plan, shoot, and edit their own films using industry standard production equipment.

The SCFA began with a generous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and was launched in the Mississippi Delta in June 2018.

Taught by professional filmmakers, high school students from the marginalized Mississippi Delta learn the art of telling their own stories through film while examining the racial barriers that still exist, not only in the South, but worldwide, and documenting such artistically.

Several of our students worked on a film that premiered at Sundance and other film festivals, while still others are pursuing careers in filmmaking.

Our goal is to host the workshop annually where students of color can work together to find their own voices through digital storytelling, as they plan, direct, produce, and edit their own independant film projects and pursue careers in the entertainment industry.

Our workshop instructors are filmmakers: Glenn Payne of Dead Leaf Productions and Ben Powell of Broken Arm Studio.