Filmography

Since I Been Down tells the dramatic story of how an American community held captive by 1990’s punitive policies lead children into gangs, violence, and for a false sense of safety, security and prosperity, this community rushed to discard the poorest, targeted brown and black youth into prisons for life. Nearly forty years later, a model and pathway to justice and healing is led from inside prison walls. A pathway uncovering, why children turn to violence, and a model of justice to transform their lives, prisons, justice and our own humanity. This is a story told by those who live it.

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"I made “Since I Been Down” because I am worried about our children, and am acutely concerned with how the culture of punishment impacts their lives.

The journey to completing “Since I Been Down” took 12 years. This length of time brought proximity to the storytellers, enhancing access, production quality, and trust and an intimacy of building shared community. I was honored to receive their home media, oral stories, analyses, and philosophies, and to bear witness to their inspiration, regrets, and hope. I embraced that witnessing in “Since I Been Down.”

- Gilda Sheppard

Gilda Sheppard's documentary film "Women Together as One" was the first ever short film selected for showing by Fest Afrique 360 at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in France. "Women Together as One" focuses on work Sheppard did with Liberian women refugees who live at the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa. She worked with the women to organize a women’s collective and design classes for economic sustainability (computer literacy, adult literacy, cosmetology, catering, sewing and tie and dye workshops) and school scholarships for their children. In this piece we see the women, strong and powerful, full of laughter and life, breaking media "victim" stereotypes at the rate of 30 frames per second. The women give horrid testimonies of rape and war however break the frame through their active "fighting against poverty" for their reentry into society after the trauma of war.

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"When I completed filming my documentary 'Women Together as One' in the Buduburam Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, a woman in the camp said, “You know, sis Gilda, the same AK-47 in child soldiers’ hands in the Liberian civil war are in your children’s hands; you need to do something about that.” Looking around in my home state of Washington, particularly the city of Tacoma, I became acutely aware of the impact of punitive polices — three strikes, hard time for armed crime, no parole — on all our children, and particularly poor Black and Brown children."

- Gilda Sheppard

Yard People: An Intergenerational Love Story, received Audience Award at 2001 Berlin International Black Cinema Art and Film Festival and the 2001 Silver Image Film Festival in Chicago.​