At the Ghetto Film School benefit held recently at Bottino in Chelsea, film industry professionals celebrated the talents they believe are the future of their business, such as Ariel Morales, of the Lower East Side, who decided he wanted to be a filmmaker after seeing "Raising Victor Vargas," because it captured his own neighborhood so vividly, and Naheem Kujenya, of Staten Island, who already has his own production company, Wrong Number Films.

"I would love to hire a good director from the Bronx," the film and music entrepreneur Damon Dash said. "I'm trying to make movies about the 'hood, and if I could hand it over to someone who even remotely understood it, I would have an Oscar by now."

The Ghetto Film School runs a 15-month program out of a former piano factory in the Bronx. This year's program will end with a trip to Uganda to make a short; Mr. Kujenya will serve as gaffer.

"GFS is creating a pipeline for underrepresented, emerging African-American and Latino artists," a vice president of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Gayle Jennings O'Byrne, said. The foundation's $110,000 grant is supporting the launch of the Cinema School, which will be the nation's first full-time, conservatory model high school dedicated to teaching filmmaking.

The Bronx Empowerment Zone has helped with the construction of Digital Bodega, a for-profit production company employing Ghetto Film School fellows and alumni.

"If the film industry doesn't buy into this program, it's going to lose," the general manager of the Independent Film Channel, Evan Shapiro, who is the school's chairman, said.

agordon@nysun.com