Ankur Singh + Cai Thomas
Ankur Singh is a 25-year-old documentary filmmaker based in Chicago currently working as a digital communications specialist for a labor union as well as running a community newspaper. His work has focused largely on education and immigration stories. He made a feature-length documentary called LISTEN about education from students' perspectives when he was 18 that screened nationwide and was featured in The Washington Post. Since then he has worked as a videographer for several non-profit organizations. A former Kartemquin Films intern, he was also a 2016 Young People For Fellow and a 2018 NeXt Doc Fellow. He hopes to create films rooted in and with long-standing communities.
Cai Thomas is a Chicago based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer from Liberty City that tells stories at the intersection of identity, self-determination, and location. She intentionally documents Black youth and elders. Cai is a NeXt Doc, Sundance Ignite, Sisters in Cinema and Kartemquin Diverse Voices in Documentary Fellow and was a Berlin Capital Fulbright awardee in 2017 as well as a Tribeca Film Institute IF/Then Finalist in 2019. She's an Emmy award-winning producer from her tenure at CBS Sunday Morning.
Last Slice
Just two days after Thanksgiving the Stokers are forced to close their family-owned pizza joint, a community staple that has called 1265 Wilson Ave home for 52 years, after their landlord increased their rent. Friends, family, former employees and regulars stop by to pay their respects.
Last Slice is one part of a three-part series of documentary shorts chronicling the final moments of small, family businesses throughout Chicago as they close their doors one last time. Visit Last Call 312 for the other two parts, about a Rogers Park coffee shop and Canaryville lumber yard.
Last Slice is a short documentary that follows the Stokers as they are forced to close down their local businesses that have been open for 2 generations but won't make it into the third. The film captures communities grappling with losing a place they consider home as large economic and political forces reshape the cities unique 77 neighborhoods. The film is an archival moment for this Uptown institution. It's important to recognized and acknowledge what was.
