“Thank you for all you do through the arts to help our political climate move through this very rough time in the US!” —Shelly Laskin Hettleman, Senator, Maryland General Assembly, Baltimore, MD, USA
“OMG. ‘For the Skeptical’ is spectacular. We can’t stop watching. Sublime filmmaking cut to a great track. Your vocals are so good. Be prepared for people to LOVE this.” —Steve Burrows,
Writer/Director of the HBO film BLEED OUT, Los Angeles, CA USA
“I am truly delighted to tell you that “For the Skeptical” won the judges’ prize in the under four minutes category. Your poetry film had everything the judges looked for; a whole greater than the sum of its parts, poetry and film each augmenting the bearing of the other. Additionally, it’s clever, imaginative, sharp and funny all at the same time.” —Fran Sanders, Director
REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2023
“ ‘For the Skeptical’ is fantastic! It’s very unique, because it is galvanizing, acute AND playful at the same time. You don’t see that very often.” —Gian-Philip Andreas, independent film critic, Berlin, Germany
“For the Skeptical” is a hybrid and militant video experiment; an expressive patchwork that on the one hand mixes different languages very well (theater, hip-hop music and archival film frames), while deliberately stimulating critical thinking (post-Covid and conspiracies of all sorts) about collective disinformation, hoping to encourage action and positive change from those who are finally aware.” —Sara Fiori, publicist, Malatesta Short Film Festival, Cesena, Italy
“Artist and activist Dawn Westlake doesn’t make a secret of the statement lying behind this music-poetry-video: “I’ve always wondered if keeping up the myths of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc was very beneficial when kids start to question them. Don’t they clock the insistence in these traditions as ‘the first lie’ they were told?”
“For the Skeptical” is an ironic feature that makes us think about the tools we have at hand to apply democracy and freedom to our lives with a smile and witty lightness.
We loved your style Dawn !” —Aurora Film Festival, Caserta, Italy