Knight Foundation

For its next dinner supporting local arts and innovation projects, Miami Soup will collaborate with Filmgate Miami, a collective aiming to redefine storytelling with immersive visual content. This pairing is just another sign of Miami’s emergence as a hotspot for developing filmmakers. “Filmgate Miami has an initiative to highlight the local talent here in Miami within the film industry,” said Carl Hildebrand, director of Miami Soup. “Those filmmakers are addressing the needs, or great stories, of people who are helping our community.” Miami Soup’s fifth dinner will occur June 25 at Whole Foods market in downtown Miami. Each of the Miami Soup events has taken place in a different locale, ranging from a nightclub to a restaurant to a professional conference. The format, however, remains consistent: a community gathering focused on creating positive change. With the purchase of a meal ticket, each participant can vote for a proposal from one of three local ventures. The profits create a microgrant awarded at the end of the evening to the project the guests choose. Past winners have been as varied as the event’s settings. The Front Yard Theater Collective created the interactive theater production, “History on Wheels,” featuring an actor as Julia Tuttle riding a bicycle through time. Miami Marine Stadium Mural Project produced limited-edition photographs of the stadium to fund protective efforts. Urban Paradise Guild purchased a water pump for an urban farm providing produce for low-income families.

Tomás Cotik Cautious, calm, modest, devoid of posturing and pretensions, Tomás Cotik is a violinist, one of the people who make Miami a good place to live. Born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he came to Miami thanks to the New World Symphony and, like so many others, decided to stay. Here he met photographer So-Min Kang, born in Hamburg of Korean parents. They married and had a daughter, Yuni. The Cotiks are part of the human landscape that make Miami a multicultural magnet, more diverse each day, from which talented residents make themselves known to the world... How did your vocation come about? When I was 5, I listened to a vinyl record of classical music at home. The sound of the strings moved me so much that I begged my parents to let me learn to play the violin. I had to start with the recorder, which was a fad at the time, and I didn’t like it at all. It took me three years to change their minds. Why the violin? Because I identified with it from the start. It was a constant in my life, and at 18 I decided to make my profession. For six years, I studied with Nicolas Chumanchanco at Freiburg’s Hochschule für Musik. Later, in Toronto, I studied with Lorand Fenives at the Glenn Gould School of Music. There, I auditioned for the New World Symphony and got the fellowship. After Canada’s rough winters, being in Miami Beach, by the beach, making music surrounded by fantastic musicians and inspired by Michael Tilson Thomas, was absolutely surreal. After two years with the NWS, I earned a position with a quartet in Texas, as college professor and concertino with the ensemble, but after two years, Miami’s charm made me return to this city, which I enjoy with my wife and daughter. We feel at home here. I finished my doctorate at the University of Miami, where I am an adjunct professor. I also play for the Florida Grand Opera and the Palm Beach Symphony, am a member of the Delray String Quartet and formed a violin-piano duo with pianist Tao Lin.

Danielle Buonaiuto as Dr. Helium White in “Intelligent Systems.” Photo by AR McFarlane. Richard Wagner never quite got the theatrical effects he was looking for in his gigantic operas, mostly because he died in 1883, before the advent of cinema. But Carson Kievman is a little luckier than that: the founder and director of the SoBe Institute of the Arts in Miami Beach has benefited from today’s digital technology to create the visual images he has had in minds for decades in his operas and musical theater pieces. For his current project, the opera Intelligent Systems, now playing in its world premiere run in the tiny black box space of SoBe Arts’ Little Stage Theater, Kievman is able to take his audiences into space and the future through digital projections that were impossible 35 years ago when he began writing the piece. “It’s not like taking an (existing) opera and making a multimedia production of it,” Kievman said. “It is a multimedia opera from beginning to end.” Intelligent Systems, begun in 1980 under a National Endowment for the Arts grant and commissioned for development by Germany’s Donaueschingen Festival in 1982, is a sci-fi-esque tale of civilization as seen on a planet much like ours in a parallel universe in which natural catastrophes ultimately lead to the development of a race of humans. They, of course, destroy their planet, but a new species of humanity arises from the chaos. “If they had been able to do it back then, they would have had to use slides, which would not have been acceptable, because a lot of the action takes place on the screen. The other thing they could have done is made a 35 mm film, but that would have been prohibitively expensive and it would not have been flexible,” he said.

To win a Fulbright is an honor that still, more than 60 years after the Fulbright U.S. Student Program was created, equates achievement, excellence and leadership. Andrew Hevia And those were the very qualities that made it possible for one Miami filmmaker, Andrew Hevia, to join over 1,900 other U.S. citizens awarded the grant to work on a project that aims to increase the understanding between the peoples of the United States and of other countries. Hevia, who recently graduated from Fordham University with a master’s degree in media entrepreneurship, will be heading to Hong Kong in the fall, taking his experience as a filmmaker with him. Hevia is one of the founders of the Knight-funded Borscht Film Festival, and part of a growing community of indie filmmakers in South Florida gaining recognition nationally. He plans to document the art world in a city that shares commonalities with Miami. Though Hong Kong is a former British colony whose sovereignty was transferred to China in 1997, it, like Miami, is a multicultural and multiethnic city that has seen its art scene grow and gain an international reputation.