Carolina Film Festival Scholarship

There is no film being made about the teeth of Gullah Geechee people. Not about the generations of families on the Sea Islands who have had no access to a dentist. Not about the oral health disparities that follow the same map as every other disparity in the Lowcountry redlining, displacement, poverty engineered by policy. Nobody is telling that story on screen. I intend to be one of the first. Side Tooth is a documentary about oral health access in Charleston, South Carolina, specifically about the patterns of untreated dental disease in communities where preventative care has historically been hard to reach. Through intimate interviews with Charleston residents, the film explores what it means to live with dental pain as a background condition, how people navigate a healthcare system with significant gaps, and what it would look like to close those gaps from the inside. I am making this film from two directions simultaneously. I am a cultural educator and documentary filmmaker who has lived and worked in North Charleston for years, building relationships with the communities I want to portray with care and accuracy. I am also a pre-dental hygiene student at Trident Technical College, completing the prerequisites I need to enter a clinical program and eventually practice in the same neighborhoods where I am filming. For me, Side Tooth is an extension of my healthcare career as it is part of the same commitment, expressed through a different tool, storytelling. The specific production needs this scholarship would support include equipment for field interviews across Charleston's neighborhoods, transportation costs, and post-production editing. I am an independent filmmaker with no institutional backing. The impact I hope to achieve is simple but urgent: when people see this film, they should understand that a Gullah Geechee grandmother who has never seen a dentist is not the result of personal failure. She is the result of a system designed to exclude her. And when pre-dental students, dental hygienists, and healthcare administrators see this film, I want them to feel the weight of that and ask what they are going to do about it. Oral health is the entry point to overall health. Untreated decay becomes infection. Infection becomes systemic illness. Communities without access to preventative dental care carry a burden that compounds across generations and Gullah Geechee communities have carried it long enough. This scholarship will bring that story to screen. And when I finish my dental hygiene degree and return to serve this community clinically, I will bring the film with me because the people who need care most deserve to see themselves reflected in the person holding the instrument.