Brown Planet Productions is a multi-faceted Chicago based production studio and the creative embodiment of its award-winning founder, Carlos Javier Ortiz, a published photographer, filmmaker, and community leader with a diverse pool of collaborators within the fields of design, architecture, music, and academia. Our work centers around the beautiful struggle and perseverance of black and brown life. Through the mediums of narrative and documentary story-telling, BPP strives to document and illuminate untold stories and impart empathy and challenge alterity through the visual arts. As well as elevate creators of color through education, opportunity, and our on-going inclusive developments.
Brown Planet Productions explores issues of discrimination, violence, poverty, pollution, migration, marginalization and human rights with decades long contributions to local and national media outlets. Our films such as We All We Got, A Thousand Midnights, Shikaakwa and our collaborations with UIC’s Institute of Healthcare Delivery Design, Square, and Apple are amongst many of our esteemed accomplishments. By approaching storytelling through historical context and ethnography and collaging images of social realism with that of contemporary styles of filmmaking, we seek to design original films that encapsulate the truth within black and brown communities. Our work is first and foremost informed by the personal philosophies and experiences embedded in our diverse crew and clientele. After twenty years of covering social issues our work has never been more relevant than now. Today, Brown Planet Productions ventures on a new chapter in film and photography to suit the ever changing landscape of popular media with a vision freshly informed by the collective consciousness of the creators of color that embody the company and its future growth.
Carlos Javier Ortiz and Brown Planet Productions is recognized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Library of Congress, and has screened films at Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles International Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, PBS Online Film Festival and Art Basel, Black and Blue, and Stadtkino Basel Cinema.
