On behalf of Reason Foundation, please join us for a special screening of Miss Virginia. Hailed as a "must-see" movie by USA Today, the film follows a struggling inner-city mother who sacrifices everything to give her son a good education. Unwilling to allow him to stay in a dangerous school, she launches a movement that could save his future—and that of thousands like him.
This is a free event and an RSVP is required.
Miss Virginia is rated PG-13: Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
A big takeaway from Miss Virginia is that Virginia Walden Ford wanted to get her son to a private school for a variety of reasons. The government-run school wasn't meeting her child's needs academically, but the nonacademic problems were arguably more important. The school wasn't safe and Virginia's son was getting mixed up with gangs and regularly skipping class. The movie also highlighted that students in the government-run school were bullied and even beat up for doing a good job in class. That kind of culture isn't conducive to success.
Lana Link, the Moving Picture Institute's vice president of talent development, recruits filmmakers into their grant programs and classes. She produces films and masterclasses. She also writes original screenplays as a member of MPI's creative team. Lana is a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former Fulbright grant recipient in Vienna, Austria. She earned her JD from Pepperdine University School of Law and her certificate in independent producing from UCLA Extension.
R. J. Daniel Hanna is a Toronto-born, Arkansas-raised writer, director, and editor. He has directed commercials for Coca-Cola, Subway, Cole Haan, and numerous other brands, but his true passion is independent cinema that can ignite social change while delivering a powerful human story.
His feature screenplays have received dozens of awards and accolades, with his script Shelter Animal making the Top 50 Scripts (out of 8,000) in the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Nicholl Fellowship. His short film SHELTER, starring Clea DuVall (ARGO, ZODIAC) and April Grace (WHIPLASH, MAGNOLIA), played at the SAG Short Film Showcase and won the Audience Award from the NewFilmmakers LA festival, among other accolades. His most recent award-winning film, EVERYTHING, is based on a true story of a mother searching for a bone marrow donor for her daughter. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal and is spurring reform in the marrow donation industry.
Working both in narrative and documentary form, Hanna also brings an editor’s eye to his sets. Films he has edited have won awards from the Emmy Foundation, the Director’s Guild of America, BAFTA, the USC Editing Faculty, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and dozens of film festivals. Hanna is repped by the Gersh Agency and Luber-Roklin Entertainment.
