“What happens when the lights come up and the credits roll? What’s the ASK of the audience?” 

This classic George Stoney question of social justice documentary filmmakers inspired the creation of Working Films in 1999. George was a founding member of our board of directors and we were deeply saddened to learn of his passing this past Thursday.

He instilled in us, and so many others, a sense of responsibility for the strategic use of film – and powerful storytelling – in fights for social and environmental justice. He believed, and taught us, that finishing a film is only 50% of the process; putting it to work to generate a deeper impact requires an additional effort of more than 50%. With the memory of George in our hearts, we will continue his work every day – reminding ourselves of his compassion, ethics, amazing sense of humor and deep love for humanity. We will miss him deeply. We will continue to be inspired by him – as we have since we started.

Every summer since 2000, we have offered a paid fellowship to a student or activist, named Stoneyships, in George’s honor. Stoney Fellows have continued to work in the field as award-winning filmmakers and Working Films staff. We look forward to a whole new generation of Stoney Fellows in the years to come and know that they, along with those of us who knew him, will be moved by his legacy – his devotion to his craft and by his belief in the power of film to transform the world.

Lucy Cooke, a PUMA Creative Winner and good friend of Working Films has an upcoming National Geographic series titled “Freaks and Creeps” set to air on Tuesday July 17 at 10pm ET. Read her blog post below to learn more about the production and her adventures:

Tasmania is like a time machine. Its primeval forests team with living fossils that have followed a different evolutionary branch to most mammals. So for freak lovers like me it’s like hitting the jackpot.

My number one quarry is the echidna – an ancient termite-eating hedgehog with what can only be described as the world’s weirdest wedding tackle. Echidnas, along with the duck-billed platypus, are the last surviving monotremes – an early branch of mammals that still lay eggs like reptiles. But despite such ancestral behaviour these oddballs are remarkably successful and have been waddling the planet since the time of the dinosaurs.

To find one I’m hooking up with Dr. Stuart Rose who has devoted the last 25 years of his life to studying the sex life of this peculiar creature. We rendezvous on a farm in the north of Tasmania on a bright but blowy morning. Stuart is accompanied by a quartet of windswept young female research students all equipped with a great Australian sense of humour. I ask them whether it was the echidna’s extraordinary penis that attracted them to their work and they all nod. Apparently I will not be disappointed.

The Echidna’s on this farm have been radio-tagged to make them easier to study. They live for up to 45 years and Stuart has been following some individuals for over a decade. We first locate a female. It’s the breeding season right now and lady echidnas are rarely alone. The competition for sex is fierce and it’s not uncommon to witness the somewhat comical sight of a solitary female being stalked by a conga line of up to ten ardent suitors.

Click here to read the full blog post.

For more information and videos on the new series, visit their page on the National Geographic site.

The Waiting Room, supported in part by our friends at The Fledgling Fund, is a film and hyper-local media project that presents a day-in-the-life perspective for patients and their caregivers in Highland Hospital’s E.R. waiting room. The film by Pete Nicks recently picked up the Special Jury prize at Silverdocs and is described by Variety as a “rock-solid vertié docu that provides ample evidence why our national health care system needs fixing.”Currently, tens of thousands of patients are not receiving the medical attention they need due to lack of health care as well as hospitals being underfunded. The Waiting Room is set for theatrical release this September and will premiere in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The team behind The Waiting Room needs your help in getting the voices of both the patients and caregivers heard to a wider audience across the nation. They have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund The Waiting Room Storytelling Project with a deadline of July 27 to reach their goal. Help call attention to the thousands of underserved patients by making a pledge here.

On June 19^th I had the pleasure of moderating our Story Leads to Action panel with my colleague Judith Helfand, co-founder of both Working Films and Chicken and Egg Pictures. This year’s panel featured the award winning documentary Brooklyn Castle. After watching several clips from the film where we saw the championship chess team and their teachers in action and learned about how budget cuts affected the after school program at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn, we launched into a strategic conversation about how the film can continue to be leveraged to support chess and other high quality after school programming in schools around the country. Filmmakers Katie Dellamaggiore,  the film’s outreach coordinator Kali Holloway and a panel of education and after-school experts from the National Education Association (Luis Gustavo Martinez), American Federation of Teachers (Delisa Saunders), The Montgomery County Maryland Council (Hans Reimer), and the Afterschool Alliance (Sarah Simpson) discussed a myriad of ways the film could be used to make change in community based settings, in theaters and at additional film festivals. For a full run down of the details of the event and some of the specifics ideas generated check out this great blog from Chicken and Egg pictures.

Last month, Working Films returned to the Sheffield Doc-Fest, June 13 – 17, hosting a third year of our highly interactive Story Leads to Action panel, co-hosted with the Festival.

Coordinated by our UK staffer Sarah Ross, and facilitated by Robert West, Story Leads to Action brought together filmmaker Frederick Gertten, and his new film Big Boys Gone Bananas*, with Marcos Zunino, a legal officer at Article 19 in London specializing in freedom of expression and international law.

In 2009, when Frederick Gertten’s film Bananas!* was accepted into the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), he was delighted. An examination of food giant Dole’s devastating use of pesticides in Nicaragua, the film would be having its world premiere in the same city as Dole’s global headquarters. Then the “cease and desist” letters started arriving. Despite not having seen the film, Dole was determined to control the narrative around it – and cast Gertten as a major liar. Dole also began bombarding the LAFF itself, from the organisers to journalists and sponsors, with shocking results.

With our Sheffield Doc-Fest audience, we facilitated a lively discussion about the current risks for filmmakers, especially from multi-national corporations with deep legal pockets. While Gertten vigorously responded to Dole’s meritless action and, with his legal team, demonstrated that the lawsuit was simply one part of Dole’s overall strategy to stifle debate about their environmental actions and liabilities, real damage to the film’s distribution strategy, especially in the US, had already been done. Our conversation was a precautionary tale about how one filmmaker’s passion for truth went against the behemoth of a multi-billon dollar industry and ultimately prevailed – as Big Boys Gone Bananas!* reveals; we shared practical tactics for documentary filmmakers and updates on how international law is supporting artistic expression.

We loved being in Sheffield in June, and look forward to coming back in 2013!