JACKSON – Township high school junior Daniel Dipierro earned third place in this year’s Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center’s “Speak Truth to Power” video contest at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
His film “Food for All” explores the importance of food pantries and food banks in the midst of deep federal funding cuts. It advocated for full funding of food banks, and showed viewers how they could help eliminate food insecurity by contacting their Congressional representatives and supporting food pantries.
Dipierro explained that in producing his video, “I partnered with Freehold Area Open Door, a nonprofit food pantry and social services organization dedicated to serving those in need. Their executive director, Geralyn Fragetta-Drury (a township high school parent), actually attended the screening with us, and it was an incredible experience that I’m truly honored to have taken part in. The event was professionally executed and I even met Kerry Kennedy herself.”
The student added, “Food for All” began as a class project in Mrs. Shedlebower’s Honors English II class last year. “This spring, I made some changes to the video as part of my Digital Media Academy Independent Study on non-fiction films with Mr. Noble to make it into a version appropriate for the contest and connected to a human right that Robert Kennedy fought for.”
“What began as a class project has become so much more and took me all the way to the Tribeca Film Festival and a Kennedy HRC Contest award winner. I am so grateful to my teachers, to JTHS, to the Digital Media Academy, and to the Jackson School District for giving me these opportunities to grow as a young filmmaker,” Dipierro said. He wrote, shot, edited, recorded, scored and directed the four-minute film that was shot at the Freehold Area Open Door food pantry.
The link to his film can be found on the school district’s website: jths.jacksonsd.org
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