Independent Lens
Mimi and Dona
After six decades of caring for her daughter Dona, who has an intellectual disability, 92-year-old Mimi must find Dona a new home.
Buried Under Years of Dust
Emily Grodin is an autistic woman who spoke minimally for a significant part of her life, until she had a breakthrough and began to express herself in new ways.
- Length
- 30 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Producer/Director
Sophie Sartain
Sophie Sartain is the co-director and producer of Seeing Allred, which premiered at Sundance and is on Netflix. Among Sartain’s credits is her ITVS-funded film Mimi and Dona, named one of the best TV shows of the year by The New York Times. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and New Day Films.
- Other ITVS Films
- Mimi and Dona
Producer
Marta Kauffman
Prior to Grace and Frankie, Netflix’s longest-running series, Kauffman was best known for co-creating the hit show Friends. She has produced several documentaries including Seeing Allred for Netflix. Kauffman has received the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in Television Writing and the Humanitas Kaiser Award.
Producer
Robbie Tollin
Tollin is an Emmy Award-winning TV and film producer, currently the producing partner of Marta Kauffman at Okay Goodnight. The company has produced Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and Seeing Allred, about civil rights attorney Gloria Allred. The company has several TV and film projects in development for a variety of streamers and networks.
Producer
Hannah KS Canter
After joining Okay Goodnight, Canter developed Grace and Frankie and produced Seeing Allred. She and Marta Kauffman have also co-written a feature and several pilots, including the comedy DINKS for Amazon, on which she serves as co-creator and co-showrunner. Canter has held posts at StudioCanal, Katahdin Foundation, and Tollin Productions.
Associate Producer
Molly Arkin
Arkin joined Okay Goodnight in 2017. She was an associate producer on Grace and Frankie and worked with the team on the feature documentary Seeing Allred for Netflix. Arkin covers Okay Goodnight’s slate of passion-driven development projects, including the improv-comedy pilot DINKS for Amazon, on which she is a co-producer.
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The Film
For the first 25 years of her life, Emily Grodin, a minimally speaking autistic woman in Los Angeles, scarcely communicated. Her parents sensed her intelligence and tried numerous methods of therapy to help her express herself, to no avail. As she grew up, Emily had an increasing number of emotional and physical outbursts. After she lashed out at a caregiver, the police were summoned. Seeking alternatives, Emily’s parents turned to a controversial method of assisted-typing that had been dismissed for decades. In a turn of events, she began to express herself—not in single words, but in sentences and paragraphs, through essays and poetry. This changed her and her family’s lives.
I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust is based on the memoir she wrote with her mother, Valerie. The film depicts Emily’s transformation in her own words, as well as through interviews, contemporary footage, and reenactments. Emily describes her current life as a student, a journalist, and an author. She revisits her childhood while watching home movies with her parents, and she explains how her inner reality often collided with people’s perceptions. Emily’s story is one of transformation, mistakes, talent, and familial love.
