IN THE BONES is a lyrical documentary that explores the personal and political by interweaving the lives of 12 characters living in Mississippi during a legislative session in which equal pay for equal work and abortion rights are being decided. Although set in three distinct regions of Mississippi, In the Bones is a much broader exploration of our culture, an unsettling portrayal of America that lingers, shining a light on the weight women live under in this country and also the resilience expressed in everyday acts of survival.

“Kelly Duane De La Vega Talks Her Robert Altman-Inspired Documentary ‘In the Bones’”

VARIETY

“‘In the Bones’ Director Kelly Duane de la Vega Talks Mississippi and Fighting the Patriarchy.”

WOMEN AND HOLLYWOOD

EDUCATIONAL SALES

Grasshopper Films is our North American distributor. To purchase the film for your organization, school or library, click here or email lily@grasshopperfilm.com

KELLY DUANE DE LA VEGA / Director, Producer, Writer

Kelly’s award-winning documentaries have screened at film festivals worldwide, opened theatrically and broadcast nationally on PBS and Netflix. THE TWO KILLINGS OF SAM COOKE, a Netflix Original, was nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary. THE RETURN, a Peabody Award Finalist, won the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, opened POV’s season, was nominated for a national Emmy, screened on Capitol Hill and in prisons across the country. Her work has received the WGA’s Best Documentary Screenplay Award, Gotham Independent Film’s Best Documentary Award and multiple national Emmy nominations. Her film BETTER THIS WORLD won Best Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International, received an IDA Creative Achievement Award and was selected to screen at NY MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. She has produced short-format work for The New York Times, Mother Jones, IFC and Discovery, among others. She also directed and produced a multimedia PROJECT TURNOUT partnering with the New York Times, Mother Jones and The Nation to explore changing election laws and their impact on people of color. She has guest lectured at various universities and taught a documentary forms course at UC Berkeley. She has served on multiple documentary juries including the Spirit Awards and is a member of the Academy - Doc Branch.

JESSICA ANTHONY / Producer, Director, Writer

Jessica has over two decades of experience in live action, animation and visual effects. Beginning her career in the commercial world, she produced award winning content for Universal, MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon, BBC, and Comedy Central. In 2015 she produced the award winning film THE MASK YOU LIVE IN (Sundance 2015, Netflix), which has screened worldwide and has a companion education curriculum that is in all 50 states. In 2016, Anthony partnered with Duane de la Vega, to produce and direct Project Turnout, creating media partnerships with Mother Jones, The Nation and the New York Times. As part of this effort she directed and produced the short film SUPREME COURT VS. THE AMERICAN VOTER (NyTimes Op Doc). She was a producer on the acclaimed narrative feature AYITI MON AMOUR, directed by Guetty Felin which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016 and was shortlisted for an Oscar. With Duane de la Vega, Anthony produced and co-directed IN THE BONES, a film that takes a cinematic journey through Mississippi providing a poetic and sometimes painful portrait of American culture. Additionally, she is producing VIVIEN’S WILD RIDE, a documentary memoir that follows a visual artist as she loses her sight (directed by Vivien Hillgrove), and an UNTITLED documentary feature (directed by Jon Shenk and co-directed by Bonni Cohen) for Actual Films/Participant Media. Jessica is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The International Documentary Association, Catapult Film Fund, Packard Family Foundation, and the Novo Foundation, among others.

ZANDASHÉ BROWN / Field Producer, Co-Director

Zandashé is an award-winning genre filmmaker born and bred in and inspired by Southern Louisiana. A self-proclaimed storyteller, Brown writes and directs stories primarily within the horror genre that showcase her perspective on identity, spirituality, and healing for Black women in the American South. In 2014, she became a fellow of the New Orleans film society’s emerging voices program for emerging directors of color. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Artless Media’s Magnifying Glass Grant and Novac’s Betterbr Grant for her documentation of the Alton Sterling protests in Baton Rouge titled Off the Sidewalks, Into the Streets. Brown’s narrative directorial debut, Blood Runs Down, was one of five projects vetted and funded by the New Orleans Tricentennial Story Incubator Grant. It has since gone on to screen and win awards at across the United States at acclaimed film festivals such as Blackstar, Overlook, Urbanworld, Austin Film Festival, and the New Orleans Film Festival.

SELINA LEWIS DAVIDSON / Consulting Producer

Selina co-founded GreenHouse Pictures with Producer Nancy Roth in 2003. GreenHouse Pictures is a New York/Northern California-based documentary production company dedicated telling diverse stories from a variety of perspectives that enlighten, educate and entertain. The company has produced more than 15 nationally broadcast documentaries exploring a wide range of topics. Recent projects include: Flat Daddy (directors: Betsy Nagler & Nara Garber). The 2009 Emmy nominated, Hard Road Home, (director: Macky Alston) which had its broadcast premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens in Feb. 2008. Occupation: Dreamland, a cinema verité portrait of American infantrymen serving in Fallujah, Iraq, (directors: Garrett Scott and Ian Olds) which was released theatrically in 2005, won the 2006 Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction award and aired on the Sundance Channel in 2006; Pack, Strap, Swallow (director: Holly Paige Joyner) which aired on the Sundance Channel in 2006; The Perfect Life, (director: Sam Lee) which had its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2006.

LILA PLACE / Editor

Lila is a documentary film editor. Her editing credits include the Oscar shortlisted 116 Cameras; The Undocumented Lawyer, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO; Harley which also premiered at Tribeca in 2020; and the Cinema Eye Honors award-winning Minka, which was nominated for an International Documentary Association award, among many others. Lila got her start working in the editing rooms of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, working on such films as Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending and 25th Hour. Lila believes that intimate, personal stories can convey powerful, universal themes and that documentaries can be as cinematic and emotionally compelling as fiction. Her work is influenced by her background in music, cultural anthropology, and dance. Lila received a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University. She lives and works in New York and Sardinia, Italy.

CLARE MAJOR / Director of Photography

Clare is a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker who specializes in intimate observational camerawork and in stories that illuminate the intersection of cultures and the lives of women and girls. She has filmed on four continents and from tuk-tuks, donkey carts, and a zeppelin. Clare’s work has appeared on HBO, Netflix, PBS, and the Discovery Channel, as well as the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and many others. She has worked on projects that have been part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times explanatory reporting package and won two College Television Awards (a.k.a. Student Emmys). Her short documentary "Feast & Sacrifice" was a Student Academy Awards national finalist. A Louisiana native now based in the Bay Area, Clare is a graduate of UT Austin’s Radio-Television-Film Program and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She served as a Peace Corps agriculture volunteer in Senegal and has walked all the way from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.

MARIO FURLONI / Director of Photography

Mario is an award-winning Brazilian filmmaker and cinematographer based in Oakland, CA. His latest project, the short documentary GUT HACK (co-directed with Kate McLean), premiered in competition at SXSW 2017 and on season 6 of the NYT OpDocs series. He is the cinematographer and co-producer of the critically-acclaimed documentary THE RETURN which chronicles the end of California’s three strikes law through the eyes of former lifers. THE RETURN won the Audience Award at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, and the Golden Gate Award at the 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival. It was the series opening film shown on PBS POV this year, and was nominated for a Peabody Award. Mario has directed a number of documentary and fiction projects, including POT COUNTRY and the Brazilian short fiction film SOMEONE IS HAPPY SOMEWHERE, official selection for San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Havana International Film Festival, and the feature documentary FIRST FRIDAY, which broadcast nationally on PBS' AfroPop. Mario shot the short documentary “After My Garden Grows,” by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Megan Mylan, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2014. He was awarded a Kenneth Ranin Foundation screenwriting grant for the feature fiction project FREELAND, currently in development (previous winners include “Fruitvale Station” and “Short Term 12”) and a residency with the San Francisco Film Society. He has a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

HANNA MILLER / Assistant Editor

Hanna is a documentary filmmaker from Collins, Mississippi. She's a graduate of Sewanee: The University of the South, where she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Russia, and UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Hanna has made multiple films about the south, including her first feature-length film, which premieres in Spring 2019, and recently, a film for PBS Digital examining how people vote in rural America. In 2017, Hanna won a pitch competition hosted by Tribeca Film Institute and was able to complete her film "We Became Fragments," which was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Kickstarter. In 2018, this film was published with New York Times Op-Docs and won Best Documentary at the L.A. Shorts International Film Festival, qualifying it for an Oscar consideration. Hanna has won a National Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence and UC Berkeley's Gobind Behari Lal Award for Exceptional Reporting. In addition to PBS Digital and New York Times Op-Docs, you can see her work in The Atlantic, PBS NewsHour, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

ANNE DEVEREUX-MILLS / Executive Producer

Anne has experience and passion for leadership, and is focused on activities that connect and mobilize women. She is a frequent public speaker on the topic of female empowerment and equality, having recently been featured at the MIT Executive MBA Program, the DLA Piper Empowering Women Worldwide panel, the Tech Stands Up rally, and in Forbes magazine. She spent the first 25 years of her career building and leading advertising agencies in New York City with a specialty in healthcare, and has been widely recognized as one of the most influential women in that industry. In 2012 Anne founded Parlay House, a national salon-style gathering of over 1,500 women who meet to pull each other forward through a combination of shared experiences, meaningful content, and peer-to-peer connections. In 2015 Anne became a mentor for SHE-CAN, and organization supporting and grooming the next generation of female world leaders coming from post-genocide countries. She also served as the director of Stanford University's Healthy Body Image Programs and mentors a wide range of women and leaders on a regular basis. Anne is very active across a broad array of social justice issues. She was the Executive Director The Return, an Emmy-nominated documentary about the experience of people returning to society post-incarceration. She and her husband were the lead sponsors of California’s Proposition 36, which restored fairness in sentencing to the State’s excessive Three Strikes Law.

MAUREEN PELTON / Executive Producer

Maureen is a social scientist with 30 years of professional experience as an Integrative Psychotherapist, Executive Coach, Organizational Consultant, Teacher and Group Facilitator. In addition, she has served as host of the Edge Learning Well Talk Radio Show and has taught courses at the Integrative Health Education Center and the Institute for Health & Healing. Maureen specializes in Transformational Leadership, Healthy Relationships, Human Development & Conditioning, Mind-Body Skills, Nonviolent Communication, and Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness. Currently, Maureen serves on the Advisory Council of The Representation Project and is Associate Producer of the documentary film, The Mask You Live In, which explores how society is failing our boys. She serves on the Board of Visitors for the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Board of the Penny George Institute Foundation, and is a Trustee of The Eagle & the Hawk Foundation. As a disrupter, Maureen is committed to a new social consciousness so that false and limited structures give place to the experience of service and love in the world.

MYRNA COLLEY-LEE / Executive Producer

CHERRY GRAZIOSI / Co-Executive Producer