This edition of the Good Pitch takes place at Silverdocs, near Washington DC. It brings together inspiring social-purpose film projects and a group of expert participants from charities, foundations, brands and media to form powerful alliances around groundbreaking films.
THE LINEUP
We are delighted to announce that we have selected the lineup for the Good Pitch @ Silverdocs. The 8 filmmakers are Victor Buhler (A Whole Lott More), Macky Alston (The Truth Will Set You Free), Jon Shenk (Higher Ground), Angad Bhalla (The House That Herman Built), Dara Kell & Christopher Nizza (Dear Mandela), Steve James & Alex Kotlowitz (The Interrupters), Danfung Dennis (To Hell and Back Again), and Annika Gustafson & Phil Jandaly ($H*T).
Selected from 150 excellent submissions, the eight projects cover an exciting range of subjects including war & conflict, disability employment, LGBT equality, incarceration and solitary confinement, violence prevention and mediation, climate change and green energy. These issues are explored through stories that play out the world over – in the USA, Afghanistan, the Maldives, South Africa and Kenya.
More on the projects: A Whole Lott More
Dir. Victor Buhler
Lott Industries in Ohio, USA employs 1200 workers with developmental disabilities. For decades, the company has built car parts. However, with the decline of the auto industry, Lott Industries finds itself in trouble. The company has twelve months to reinvent itself. A Whole Lott More details the most crucial year in Lott Industries’ history and follows three inspiring workers with disabilities as they join the struggle to hold onto the best job they have ever had.
The Truth Will Set You Free
Dir. Macky Alston
The story of a man whose two defining passions are in great conflict: his love for God and his love for his partner Mark. This film follows Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay partnered bishop in the high church traditions of Christendom, and a host of others who are making history and whose lives hang in the balance of the current church/state battles for LGBT equality.
Higher Ground
Dir. Jon Shenk
His nation of 1,200 low-lying islands is sinking as sea levels rise. Higher Ground is a film about Mohammed Nasheed, President of The Maldives, and his extraordinary role in the global climate war. During his first year in office, we follow as Nasheed breathlessly carries the fight to chambers of power in London, the United Nations, India, and finally to Copenhagen for ten intense days in December, 2009. This drama pits a die-hard activist for human rights – Nasheed himself was imprisoned and tortured as he fought for democracy in the Maldives – against the nasty geopolitical realities of the growing climate debate.
The House That Herman Built
Dir. Angad Bhalla
“What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?” This film captures the remarkable creative journey and friendship of Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, and artist Jackie Sumell while examining the injustice of prolonged solitary confinement.
Join us for an inspiring weekend workshop designed to jump start campaigns for a limited number of excellent social issue documentaries on the 23rd-25th, July 2010. Outcomes include the identification of a range of potential outreach partners – including leading non-profits and social entrepreneurs as well as corporate and branding agencies.
The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation and Working Films designed this workshop to create effective and strategic outreach campaigns and non-traditional distribution plans – reaching the audiences who need these films. Working Films’ co-founders Robert West and Judith Helfand and their team have masterminded campaigns behind feature docs such as Rory Kennedy’s Emmy Award-winning The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Helfland’s Everything’s Cool, resulting in significant shifts in the marketplace, public and political opinion in the US. Working Films’ new full-time partnership with Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation brings this high-level expertise to the UK filmmaking community.
The aim of the workshop is to help you:
• Develop audience and community engagement strategies
• Identify potential strategic partners (i.e. charities, NGOs and brands)
• Form an outreach strategy specific to your film
• Leverage and extend the life of your film
• Make social networking work for you
INSURE IMPACT!
Each project will leave the Workshop with an outline of activities and proposed partners appropriate for pre-release, release and post-release to give your film a long and effective life.
As Thursday is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re thinking about our impact in the sustainability work that we do, and the change that media projects like No Impact Man can spark.
How do filmmakers create an audience engagement campaign that is unique, yet has ties to a movement that already exists? Gillian Caldwell, Campaign Director of 1Sky, puts it simply when speaking about their partnership with No Impact Man, “It’s important that the relationship be reciprocal.”
Working Films and The Fledgling Fund are excited to bring you the second video in our series, No Impact Man: Activating Your Audience. It illustrates the benefits of mutually beneficial relationships and demonstrates creating opportunities for participation that extends the story beyond the film. Watch the video and find out how No Impact Man and its partners, like 1Sky, worked together to move participants from individual action to collective action.
I just came across this great article about the Transition movement. This movement isn’t about sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves because of climate change and peak oil. It’s about doing something, or as the article says, “Transition wants people to envision and create models for that future — and find much to be cheerful about.”
I was excited to see the Transition movement getting the attention it deserves, especially because Working Films just recently worked with Transition USto put together a special offer for their supporters who want to host a screening of Garbage Dreams. We hope those in the Transition US network will be inspired by the pro-active recycling work of the Zaballeen and use community screenings of the film to support their own community- based solutions to environmental and economic changes!
What do indigenous communities in the Amazon and a rather prosperous coastal town in North Carolina have in common? Not much you might think, and generally you would be right. There are certainly many differences, but it turns out that folks concerned about the environment and public health in Wilmington, North Carolina have much to learn from communities struggling for environmental justice in the Ecuadorian villages featured in the film Crude. A screening of Crude at the Cucalorus Film Festival in Working Films’ hometown of Wilmington, N.C. gave me the opportunity to make the connection between a powerful international David and Goliath story and local struggles to protect our health and environment.
Joel Bourne, and Andy Myers with me, Anna Lee
Crude is a real-life, high stakes legal drama that uncovers the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case in which indigenous communities are suing Texaco/ Chevron for the environmental, cultural, and medical devastation that the companies’ oil exploration have wreaked on their communities and land. We don’t have any oil exploration happening on the coast of North Carolina, but we do have a multi-national corporation called Titan America that has gotten 4.2 million dollars in tax incentives from our county commissioners to build the fourth largest cement plant in the country, right on the banks of the beautiful Cape Fear River.
For those of you that don’t know much about cement plants, they are coal fired kilns that spew particulate matter including mercury and other toxic chemicals into the air and water. In order to make the cement, companies have to quarry limestone, a process that has the potential to drastically deplete and pollute our local aquifer.
The Tales from Planet Earth film festival this weekend, Nov. 6-8, will screen some 50 environmental films from around the world that explore how stories told through film can influence our understanding of, and relationships to, nature.
But the festival, organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, is more than just hunkering down in a dark theater to watch spectacular films: Organizers hope the films will inspire audiences to action on behalf of environmental justice and the diversity of life.
And local action inspired by the festival is already under way, even though a single curtain has yet to be raised or light dimmed. UW-Madison students in the class Community Engagement Through Film have developed partnerships with area nonprofit organizations that work on issues raised in the festival’s films. The class is being taught by Gregg Mitman, festival director and interim director of the Nelson Institute; and Judith Helfand, filmmaker, activist, educator and artist in residence at UW-Madison this semester.
“There was so much enthusiasm from the last festival. I wanted to take that energy and turn it into activism,” says Mitman. “Environmental film festivals on college campuses are growing, and I wanted to create a model for others to follow. This class is a true expression of the Wisconsin Idea.”
The students’ class projects address, on a local level, issues such as hunger, homelessness, food sources, nutrition, emergency preparedness, animal rehabilitation and community-based conservation. The class has already established some exciting partnerships with impressive outcomes:
• Several local grocery stores have agreed to stock products made by Porchlight, a local organization that hires and trains homeless people to work in its kitchens. Increasing sales of Porchlight’s products, which are mostly bottled goods such as jams and pickled veggies, baked goods and salads, will spur more hiring and training. The Wisconsin Union is also now buying some of these items for its food service operations, as are some campus sororities and the local Great Dane Pub and Brewing Company. In addition, Marling Home Works, a building supply company, is helping to organize a fundraiser to help Porchlight buy a commercial-scale convection oven to increase its productivity.
• Madison’s Whole Foods Market has agreed to purchase food shares from the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition to donate to food pantries. Food pantries rarely have fresh vegetables to offer their clients, so this effort will ensure a steady supply on their shelves. Whole Foods will also donate fresh fruits through the winter months to help fill gaps. The Bradshaw-Knight Foundation has also purchased shares along with individual donors.
• Interstate Books4School has agreed to donate a large number of children’s books to the food pantries.
• Madison Gas & Electric Co. is donating $500 to several community groups to purchase green energy credits. These will help the groups pay their utility bills and also offset carbon emissions generated by the film festival.
• Marling Home Works is donating materials to build a children’s garden kitchen at Troy Community Gardens on Madison’s north side, where they will learn to prepare healthy meals from the vegetables they help grow.
Other partnerships and projects are still being developed. “Some of these students have lived in Madison for years but have never left the isthmus. They are seeing that the issues in the films are very real, and real right here,” says Mitman. “They are also learning new ways to think about community service — where they learn about doing things ‘with’ people, not ‘for’ them. That builds relationships, trust and follow-through.”
Although we wrapped up the Content +Intent Documentary Institute just under a month ago, I wanted to take a moment to share some photos from the event in the hopes of giving you a glimpse into the inner workings of the residency and, if you are a filmmaker, peak your interest in participating in future Working Films’ residencies and workshops. The 5 days that we share with filmmakers at MASS MoCA each year is re-energizing for me because I get a chance to interact with both the folks making these powerful films and with people who put them to good use. It’s an intense time of hard work and discussion, but as you’ll see from the pictures below it’s lots of fun as well.
Everyone fueled up with an array of breakfast choices at our home away from home in North Adams, The Porches.
Every filmmaker had an hour of the residency dedicated solely to the discussion of her (or his) outreach plan. Here, filmmaker Luisa Dantas and Robert West, Working Films' ED, discuss her project Land of Opportunity.
Filmmakers got to see Working Films' model in action at this community event built around the film The Hunger Season. Filmmaker Beadie Fenzi and Judith Helfand, Working Films Co-founder, discussed how the film could be used to make change with representatives from the local food bank in North Adams.
At The Hunger Season event audience members got to sample the corn meal that is depicted in the film and is sent to Swaziland as Food Aid.
Several funders of creative media and outreach campaigns were generous enough to spend time answering our residents' questions.
All of the filmmakers at the residency, including Marcia Jarmel pictured here, spent time working on their individual outreach plans with input from Working Films staff, like Deputy Director Molly Murphy.
In the midst of all of this work residents got a chance to check out the art at MASS MoCA.
Thanks so much to participating filmmaker Ashley Yorkfor these photos!
Saving Jackie is a snapshot of a recovering addict’s attempt to strengthen her damaged relationships with her two estranged daughters. Over the course of the documentary, daughter/director Selena Burks revisits life changing events and examines the long-term side effects of abusive behaviors on family relationships.
Selena recently shared with me, her thoughts on the residency:
I left MASS MoCA feeling focused, re-energized, and confident in the fact that not only had I become an activist filmmaker but that I had the strong support from Working Films and my filmmaker peers to back me up.
She explained how the residency prepared her and focused her ideas:
At the residency, each filmmaker is allotted a block of time to develop creative ways to enhance their film’s impact on its particular social/political subject matter. Robert, Judith and the rest of the filmmakers all participate in this discussion. It was during my session when the idea for developing a website as my outreach tool became a unanimous decision by the group. A stylish, informative, organized, and user-friendly website would be the most effective way to introduce myself, the film, the campaign and the work that I do to the organizations I hope to work with.
I recently worked with Selena to develop the online presence for her film campaign. Thanks to generous support from the Chicken & Egg Pictures, we were able to work with some cutting edge graphic designers to make a site that will serve as a robust tool for the campaign. Having strategized the development of websites for film campaigns in the past, including those for Everything’s Cool,Pray the Devil Back to Hell (theatrical release), and Deadline (youth initiative), I was excited to be a part of the collaboration.
As we gear up for the Content + Intent Documentary Institute, Working Films Residency at MASS MoCA for 2009 I have been in touch with alumni of the residency to see what they are up to and find out about ways the residency has influenced their audience engagement efforts. I was very excited when I received an email from ’06 Mass MoCA alum Paula Consolini sharing with me a new educational website that she has built using clips from her film Breaking the Mold.
When Paula was at the MASS MoCA residency we brainstormed with her about how to freshen up her material and help it make a real educational impact by using an online distribution platform. Now she has made that happen.The site, www.breakingthemold.org, is billed as a study in workplace democracy. (more…)
Often times we hear on the news about the hundreds of thousands of people crossing into the United States every year, but seldom do we stop to think that among them are young children… 9, 12, 14 years old risking their lives in the desert. On September 27 I was honored to spend the bulk of the day strategizing with incredible activists and organizers about how Children in No Man’s Landcan enhance their work to protect the lives and rights of children and other immigrants crossing our southern border.
An experience the day before the Summit reawakened in me the need to get this story out to folks across the U.S. My colleague and I stopped by the offices of the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos,a leading advocacy group in Tucson AZ whose work aims to save lives, educate immigrants about their rights and change the policy that is putting them in danger. A wonderful volunteer, Isabel, helped us with some logistics for the meeting and showed us around the offices. The cramped quarters were filled with posters, fliers, banners, and research documents, evidence of all of the amazing work that these folks are doing. As we were on our way back out Isabel took us to a small closet where she showed us these crosses: one for each person that Derechos Humanos knows has died crossing the desert.
Join us for an inspiring weekend workshop designed to jump start campaigns for a limited number of excellent social issue documentaries on the 23rd-25th, July 2010. Outcomes include the identification of a range of potential outreach partners – including leading non-profits and social entrepreneurs as well as corporate and branding agencies.
