Ariana and the Voices of Fillmore Place

Voces de Fillmore: Celebrating Stories from Los Sures from Voces de Fillmore on Vimeo.

Voces de Fillmore is a film tracing the memories and experiences of families living on one block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The block, Fillmore Place, is a small street nestled in the Southside, or more affectionately known by long time residents as Los Sures.

The Southside’s Latino population has steadily decreased from seventy to forty-five percent of the neighborhood. In the past decade, the population has gone from roughly 20,000 to 15,000 Latino residents. Voces de Fillmore is a first-person narrative of families who have lived and raised children in Los Sures for several decades and their quest to preserve a sense of community in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

One of the fillmmakers is our own Ariana.  Ariana was born in 1987 in Northern California.  She attended Fordham University graduating in 2009. She was accepted into an AmeriCorps program and placed at New Design High School. She was hired after her internship by Urban Arts Partnership to develop a new program at the school that targets low attendance and low overall school engagement through counseling, academic advisement, art classes and family involvement.  She currently runs the iDesign program at New Design.  She has been engaged in filmmaking for a number of years.   Her advice to young Mediastormers, “Never underestimate the power of human connections!”