When and why was the Hip Hop Odyssey Film Festival developed?
Martha: The film festival was developed in January 2002. It was founded because I was struggling with finding platforms that cultivated my work as a hip-hop filmmaker and I ran across a situation where I needed to create my own platform, because I was running into people who had R&B film festivals. I wanted to create something specifically to our genre that would be owned by us. Format: How has the festival grown since 2002? Martha: Well, together with a dozen other activists, filmmakers, educators, industry executives, we got together and we just put the film festival together. We had 45 submissions the first year, the second year we had 65, third year 90, and it just grew and grew, and now we have over 100 pieces this year. And so it’s grown substantially. We incorporate a lot of community dialogue, so we bring in experts in the field, scholars, historians, to talk about some of the issues that are being addressed in these movies. And we figure out ways we can create an intergenerati
