ABOUT
Emma Francis-Snyder is a New York-based activist and documentary filmmaker.
DIRECTORS STATEMENT
As a director, I aim to share positive stories of resistance, celebrate our collective successes, and shed light on the incredible courage and sacrifice on the part of those who fought for our most basic human rights. Having been moved to action by film in my own life, I believe deeply in the power of filmmaking to inspire viewers to take action to shape the world and to fight for the dignity of all people.
With her film Takeover, Francis-Snyder was a 2017 Union Docs Summer Fellow and the winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Film Festival Exchange pitch. She was invited to pitch at the the 2019 Reykjavik International Film Festival Talent Lab and the 2020 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and was awarded a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Emma Francis-Snyder’s acclaimed documentary short, Takeover (2021), about the Young Lords’ 1970 occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, was shortlisted for an Academy Award® and nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary. The film made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and is available to stream through the New York Times Op-Docs.
ABOUT EMMA
She is also the co-producer of Straight/Curve (2016) and the associate producer for Yoruba Richen’s award-winning I Rise series (2016). In 2019, she was the Line Producer for Mashable’s three-part series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
After seeing Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke as undergraduate, Francis-Snyder dropped out of college and moved to New Orleans to rebuild houses in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Years later, she returned to New York, enrolled in CUNY Brooklyn College, and joined the fight against the privatization of public education. It was in the midst of that fight that Francis-Snyder first picked up a camera, feeling called to document the acts of courage all around her that would otherwise be lost to history. She graduated with a self-designed major in Social Documentation.