Category Archives: In the Works

A first-time feature director channels Wiseman and the Maysles as she spends two years observing the inner workings of an unconventional school.

As a child, director Amanda Wilder once visited England’s Summerhill School, the first “free school,” an experimental school structured around shared and equal decision-making by educators and pupils, as well as interest-directed learning versus a mandatory curriculum. Also known as democratic schools, “free schools” have since popped up around the world, numbering in the hundreds. When Wilder learned about a free school opening in Little Falls, NJ, she arranged to film The Teddy McArdle Free School’s first day but ended up filming for two years. Employing an observational rather than interview focused approach, Wilder and producer Jay Craven capture not only this relatively novel and unusual approach to education, but also the learning curve that comes from starting a new institution – especially one intentionally divorced from traditional hierarchical models. Continue reading →

The producer of SILVERLAKE LIFE and JUPITER’S WIFE constructs a decades-long portrait of her influential mentor, one of the legendary architects of Direct Cinema.

Over the course of nearly forty years, Jane Weiner filmed documentary master, Richard Leacock, with a camera that he lent her to encourage her interest in filmmaking. Shooting intermittently over the four decades, Weiner captured moments with her mentor and conversations with his contemporaries reflecting on their lifelong work of documentary storytelling. From this privileged perspective, Weiner constructs a longitudinal portrait of a master filmmaker, helping to preserve his knowledge and legacy. Continue reading →

The story of a gay porn mogul turned political activist/philanthropist.

As the head of Falcon Studios, Chuck Holmes rode the parallel wave of the home video explosion and the greater visibility of gay culture to a fortune in the 1980s and ’90s, providing gay men with access to adult entertainment in the privacy of their own homes. While a savvy businessman, the charismatic Holmes nevertheless harbored some ambivalence about the nature of his work, and, perhaps as a result, turned to philanthropy. Giving back to the community who enabled his profits, he donated millions to gay activist organizations, political advocacy groups, and gay and gay-friendly politicians – but was always aware that his contributions could be looked upon as tainted or potentially too damaging politically to accept because of his porn connections. Director Michael Stabile’s debut feature doc explores Holmes uneasy straddling of these two worlds – porn and philanthropy. Continue reading →

The filmmaking team behind Sundance docs WORDPLAY and IOUSA profiles an inspiring and innovative hands-on design classroom.

Two designers come to a rural NC town to run a high school class on design and building that culminates in architecture that benefits the struggling community. Emily Pilloton and her partner Matthew Miller are committed to using design to find practical solutions to address the problems of those most in need through their non-profit Project H. Bertie County certainly qualifies, recognized as the poorest and most rural county in NC. With the help of a forward-thinking school superintendent, the duo pitches a high-school curriculum to offer about a dozen kids direct experience with their mantra: “Design. Build. Transform.” Beyond learning how the process of design works, students learn to work together to actually create useful objects. Smaller initial projects culminate in a grandscale project that will benefit, and, hopefully, reinvigorate the entire town. Director Patrick Creadon and Producers Christine O’Malley and Neal Baer follow Emily and Matthew (and some of their students) for a year, through a challenging, but ultimately uplifting year. Continue reading →

A multifaceted exploration of a “beauty pageant with a difference.”

Using Western ideas as a vehicle to draw attention to the plight of his nation, a Tibetan promoter has run a beauty pageant for young Tibetan women for the past decade. Drawing participants from around the world to Dharamsala, the Miss Tibet Pageant aims to help the non-violent protest against Chinese occupation of Tibet by appealing to more populist and modern tastes – a tactic that has not escaped criticism. In their documentary, director/producer Norah Shapiro and producer Kelly Nathe explore the controversial event over its entire history, focusing on would-be Miss Tibets in three separate pageants. Continue reading →

The maker of the acclaimed documentaries A PLACE OF RAGE and WARRIOR MARKS turns her camera on the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE COLOR PURPLE.

British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar previously collaborated with Alice Walker on both the documentary and book versions of WARRIOR MARKS, which deals with female genital mutilation. For the present project, the two women rejoin as director and subject respectively, telling Walker’s story. At the same time, the project is conceived as not only a biography of the celebrated author/activist, but the story of race, class, gender, and social change in America during her lifetime. Continue reading →

Cesar Chavez’s life and legacy take the forefront to highlight the inequities in farm workers rights that persist today.

In 1962, Mexican-American civil rights activist and former farm worker Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founded the labor union which would became the powerhouse United Farm Workers within a few years. The group’s organization of a grape pickers’ strike and grape boycott generated national attention and led to reforms for the conditions and wages of farm workers, and made Chavez an enduring symbol for labor. Still, despite the victories won, today’s farm workers still barely subsist. Director Richard Ray Perez hopes to use Chavez’s story to inspire re-engagement with the issue of farm workers’ rights. At the core of the film is never-before-seen footage of Chavez’s 1988 “Fast for Life” which he undertook to protest the use of harmful pesticides. Building off of this act of sacrifice – one of many Chavez underwent before his death in 1993 – the film promises to delve into the fullness of the noted organizer’s life and work to provide not only a portrait of the man, but a blueprint to help enact change today. Continue reading →

The director of the seminal PARIS IS BURNING meditates on how we cope with loss, or, perhaps more tellingly, how we try not to.

Jennie Livingston lost four close members of her family in the span of five years. Forced to confront this much loss back-to-back, she became conscious of the deep discomfort our society has around death and impermanence. Taking a first-person approach, her film explores the impact of this stigma, both on the personal level and broadening out to its impact on American and global culture. At the same time, Jennie looks back on her experience at a “hippie summer camp” she attended in the 1970s, and the youthful impulse to chart ones own identity separate from one’s family – an impulse which becomes recontextualized and reconsidered when one’s family is later taken away due to death. Continue reading →

One of TIBET IN SONG’s DPs joins forces with the creator of a 1970s nightly free-speech television program to unearth the story of what happened when the media was used to tell the truth.

Co-director Howie Samuelsohn produced and directed the original UNDERGROUND NEWS out of Chicago’s WSNS-TV in 1970 as a response to what was perceived as the whitewashing of the mainstream news, especially with regard to news on Vietnam. Originally broadcasting for ten minutes each night before midnight, the radical and loosely-structured show quickly grew, attracting the attention of the counterculture and its celebrity supporters, many of whom became guests of the program. In its time on the air, its young college student host (and future Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont Award-winner) Chuck Collins welcomed the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Donald Sutherland, Cheech and Chong, and even R Crumb in his first televised appearance. Poised for national syndication, investors unexpectedly pulled out, and Samuelsohn and Collins discovered the limits of free speech in an era of surveillance an counterintelligence. When Carrie Lederer learned that Samuelsohn still had an extensive archive of tapes, film, and other materials from the show, the duo set out to reveal the buried story of UNDERGROUND NEWS for a new generation, unfortunately more relevant than ever given the compromised state of the mass media today. Continue reading →

The director of TWO TOWNS OF JASPER and BANISHED takes on the deadly consequences of US immigration and the economic disparity between the US and countries to the south.

Marco Williams, already known for a number of films exploring issues of social justice and racism in America, turns his camera on the story of would-be undocumented workers who attempt to cross into the Arizona from Mexico, but end up dying in the unforgiving Sonoran Desert. Driven to migrate due to a lack of economic opportunity, and unable to do so legally because of current immigration policies, more than 1500 have died in this manner in the last decade. Williams traces their stories, taking a multiperspectival approach – following ill-prepared migrants planning to cross, border agents who try to stop them, humanitarian groups who try to provide resources such as water, forensic teams that work to identify dead bodies, and migrant families back home who often don’t know what’s happened to their loved ones. Focusing primarily on those who have already died, Williams aims to give voice to those who have already been silenced, and create a dialogue among the living to stop further needless deaths.

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