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A one hour documentary and website/outreach project
Watch the trailer
Twenty five years ago, the Dudley Street Triangle in Roxbury was a moonscape of arson-charred vacant lots that lured illegal trash and toxic waste dumping, illness, and crime—a recipe for neighborhood collapse. A one hour documentary Holding Ground, completed in 1995, told the story of how the neighborhood seized control of its destiny and began rebuilding its community.
Today after providing more than 250 homes to low income owners through an ingenious land trust arrangement and after building scores of community organizations to meet the needs of the neighborhood, we will revisit the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and many of its original characters. Holding Ground Revisited will explore how its work has changed the long term prospects of the Dudley Street Area residents and leadership, examine how the current housing and economic crisis will challenge the organization, and reveal the organization itself redefining its role in the community.
The first Holding Ground film is used in hundreds of communities as a model and inspiration to work in their own neighborhoods. One of its principal funders, the Ford Foundation, holds it up as one of its most successful community organizing grantees.
As one in ten American homes faces foreclosure this year, the fact that only one home in the DSNI community initiative is facing that fate is testament to the power of the model – and the people who are making it a reality.
Production slated for Summer/Fall 2009 |
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Two hour PBS special, book and website project
Of the hundreds of millions of faithful who identify as Christian, Jewish or Muslim, relatively few are aware of the deep strain of mystical practice at the core of their religious traditions. Fewer still have studied mysticism in the monotheistic faiths; most associate mysticism with Eastern religious practive. How the mystical tradition is echoed in each of the great Abrahamic traditions – in history and today – remains largely unknown. Yet mysticism—the view that all of us, and all of reality are unified in a single divine expression—is a living dimension of each of these religions.
Even more stunning is that whether it’s Sufism in Islam, or the Jewish Kabbalah, or the contemplative practices of Christian monks one finds in their mystical doctrines, meditations and beliefs a stunning similarity, even though they emerge from different Abrahamic religions They are all saying essentially the same thing: that “God” is One, that we are all united in his/her divinity and we should strive to wake-up from the delusion that we’re all living separately in a world of competing egos.
This two hour special will reveal these similarities – while still conveying the cultural differences – through today’s Sufi, Kabbalah and Christian practitioners, within and outside monastic or closed communities. The songs, the art, poetry and teachings in each these Abrahamic mystical traditions are beautiful and breathtaking in their inspirational quality and insight. And they illuminate the same truths, often using the same
language and metaphors. Our final project will include a website, a CD and a print volume of collected writings and poetry from the mystical
traditions of the three faiths.
Advisors include foremost authorities in each of the Abrahamic faith traditions.
Support for development from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities |
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A Two-Part Documentary Series, public engagment project and website
At the inception of our democracy, George Washington insisted that “every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property but even his personal service to the defense of it.”
Surprisingly, a recent survey of customers at middle and working glass big box store Cosco found that close to 70% of Americans might agree. They voted overwhelmingly for some sort of mandatory national service.
But what kind of service? Military service? Now with multiple front wars, the question is regularly raised: is an all-volunteer army enough? should the draft be reinstated? The question is met with fear and loathing. The history of mandatory conscription in America is rife with problems and injustices; its end in 1972 was welcome.
What do we as citizens owe our country, beyond taxes? Scandinavian countries offer models, a new Administration is calling for service and sacrifice from all its citizens. What form should, or could, it take?
These are the question this new two part series will tackle. A centerpiece of the project will be a history of America’s military draft, from the Civil War through Vietnam. Featuring a series of families whose members had participated in the last three conscriptions, the series will offer an intimate portrait of the workings and effects of the draft. But the series will go beyond the military option and look at other possibilities. Development funding provided by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities |
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One hour special for PBS
This film project retells the creation of Gunnar Myrdal’s groundbreaking study An American Dilemma, and compares Myrdal’s discoveries and findings to the conditions of race relations and social equity in our society today. Like Myrdal, the principal voices of this inquiry will be non-American historians, philosophers, economists, social scientists and human rights advocates. Since the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, the view of America from outside the democracy has offered a critical perspective on the American experiment. Our extraordinary presidential elections have moved the nation and the world into a new era, offering a perfect moment to reexamine the meaning of our American Creed, just as the Swedish Economist Myrdal did in American Dilemma. As the world begins to see our nation differently, so we begin to reexamine our selves, our commitment to social justice, and how the American Creed speaks or doesn’t speak to racial challenges in the 21st century.
The energy of this film will draw on the creative forms Vital Pictures developed in its Herskovits film – provocative animation, original photomontage re-enactments, rarely seen audio and film recordings all propelling the narrative of the creation of Myrdal’s monumental work. |
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A One Hour Documentary, PBS & International Distribution
For decades, a beautiful stained glass window depicting the Feast of Pentecost illuminated tens of thousands of baptisms, communions, confirmations, weddings and funerals in an ordinary working class parish of Chicago, St. Benedict’s. Over the years, St. Benedict’s German population became Hispanic, then gentrified. And over the years, American Catholicism changed dramatically
One member of that parish whose grandparents likely raised the early funds for the building of the church, moved to live in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. On a lonely Sunday morning, searching for a respite from the sharp loneliness of being white in emphatically black Africa, she went to Mass at the Cathedral of St. Joseph. And she found to her astonishment a facsimile of that same Pentecost window. It has emerged from the same stained glass workshop in Munich as had the window in St. Benedict’s in Chicago. St. Joseph’s parish too had undergone tumultuous change – from a German colony to a British colony to a socialist black nation to, now, a stable burgeoning African nation.
ONE WINDOW, TWO WORLDS will paint an intimate portrait of the Feast of Pentecost window, exploring both parishes through the eyes of one woman – and her family – who lived, loved, and worshipped in both. |
A One Hour Documentary, Development Funding from the LEF Moving Picture Fund
Watch the trailer
Today in America, the population of people over the age of 80 is the single fastest-growing age group in the country, soon to be joined by seventy-seven million Baby Boomers. The myths around aging are legion – that most elders are sick, for instance, or conservative or just plain inactive. The data tells a different story and it’s a story we as a society will want to start learning in all its dimensions – social economic, medical. But regardless of the data, the reality of aging is profoundly personal and emotional – how do we as families engage in the aging process, especially with family members in need. What Time is Left is a personal story that offers an intimate exploration of an idea that is beginning to take hold: Slow Medicine. Slow Medicine is an empathicapproach to elder care that urges us to adopt the pace and concerns of our elders and to prepare carefully for decisions that may involve complicated, expensive and invasive end of life medical care. Told from the perspective of Dakin Henderson, a recent college graduate, What Time Is Left follows the extended Henderson family as they care for two grandmothers living in the same facility – one lively and active, the other in need of constant care, and three aunts and uncles at different places on the aging spectrum. The story weaves in the life and perspectives of Dr. Dennis McCullough, author of My Mother, Your Mother – a virtual handbook of slow medicine. Through the voices of three generations in one appealing, thoughtful family, What Time if Left reveals the difficult choices – and the tenderness -- that can surround the final years and days of their much loved elders.
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