PhilanTopic

Justice Matters | Filmfest DC

(Kathryn Pyle is a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic. In January, she blogged about the lessons a new generation of activists can learn from the civil rights documentary Freedom Riders.)

How do you tell a new story about the Palestinian conflict, one that touches audiences in a different way, goes beyond the nightly news images, and sparks new ideas and discussion?

For filmmaker Emad Burnat, co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, which is being shown as part of the Justice Matters series at Filmfest DC in Washington this week, the answer was personal. "There have been many films made about Palestine, but the filmmakers didn't live the situation, didn't know the reality. I live there; and I was always filming. My cameras were part of the non-violent resistance that my village, Bil'in, mounted against the Israeli occupation of our lands. I used my camera to protect myself and my friends and the other villagers. And when it came to shaping a story out of the seven hundred hours I'd filmed over seven years, I realized that it had to be my story; the story of my own experience."

That personal connection has struck a chord: 5 Broken Cameras premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) last fall; showed at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the World Cinema Directing Award for documentaries; and has gone on to screen at numerous festivals and win many more prizes. This summer it will be featured in several Israeli festivals and on Israeli television and will open in the U.S. as well.

Burnat, who had been a farmer, got a camera to film his new baby in 2005 and then turned it on the conflict in his village, sharing his extraordinary footage with international news agencies. He met his co-director, Guy Davidi, an Israeli there to film a documentary, and together, with support from the Global Perspectives Project of the International Television Service (ITVS) and IDFA's Jan Vrijman Fund, they created 5 Broken Cameras.

About fifty D.C.-area filmmakers gathered on Saturday morning at Busboys & Poets, a restaurant-cum-progressive cultural/community center at 5th & K Streets for a "salon" event with several directors and producers in town for Filmfest DC, which opened April 2 and runs through April 22. Two films that are part of the 2012 Justice Matters program -- Burnat's and Ravida Din's Pink Ribbons, Inc. -- were featured.

"This is the third year for Justice Matters," said Filmfest DC director Tony Gittens, who founded the festival in 1987. "Justice Matters has proven to be very successful and has given us a way to offer something special to the metropolitan Washington audience. Every festival tries to take advantage of its locale, to reach out to the people who live there. D.C. is unique because so many people here are interested in policy issues: it's in the newspapers, in the workplace, and around the dinner table. Justice Matters is a natural for us."

Conceived and programmed by Linda Blackaby and supported by the CrossCurrents Foundation, this year's Justice Matters series is showing Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, Blood in the Mobile, Brothers on the Line, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, The Island President, and Pink Ribbons, Inc., in addition to 5 Broken Cameras.

Funding from the Wyncote Foundation makes possible the other component of the program: the Impact Project, which concentrates on community partners -- organizations that, according to Blackaby, "have some kind of stake in the issue the film addresses. We identify the community partners, often in collaboration with the filmmaker, and they range from grassroots groups to large NGOs."

For instance, the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank that works on the Middle East as well as other issues, is paired with 5 Broken Cameras. At the screening of Pink Ribbons, Inc., an expose of corporate appropriation of the breast cancer cause, representatives of Breast Cancer Action were there to respond to the film. Another Pink Ribbons, Inc. partner is the National Breast Cancer Awareness Coalition, which shared information about its Breast Cancer Deadline 2020 petition drive to improve research results.

"This model, of linking social issue films with local organizations working on the issues presented in the films, is not new," said Blackaby. "The San Francisco Green Fest, an environmental film festival, strongly promotes these action-partnerships, but they're an activist festival by definition. What's unusual is a more generalist film festival that shows a variety of good new films on various topics, especially international films, supporting those community partnerships. A few festivals do it and do it well, like the Cleveland International Film Festival, and more festivals express an interest. But even festivals that have a real commitment to this approach find it requires a lot of staff time to make meaningful connections."

As the series has grown, the festival has learned how to do it more effectively.

"This is the first year we've had partners for every film, more than twenty in all," notes Blackaby. "They're listed on the Web site as links that take visitors directly to their own sites. Their participation depends on the issues, and activities vary. Some partners send staff to the screenings to engage in the post-screening discussions and distribute literature. This year, the Guatemalan Human Rights Committee/USA has an intern dedicated to bringing a Guatemalan audience -- there is a large population here in the metropolitan region -- to see Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, about the international criminal case against a former Guatemalan military leader."

In addition to IPS, 5 Broken Cameras partners include Docs in Progress, Peace Café, and Reporters Without Borders. Busboys and Poets' owner and festival supporter Andy Shallal moderated the film's post-screening discussion and asked Burnat what his goals for the film were. Simple, said Burnat: educate people about the experience of his village, which includes the arrest of children and other violations of international law. "I don't trust the politicians. My hope is in ordinary people; they can bring about change."

Individual voices and community-based activism is also the solution presented by Pink Ribbons, Inc., which remembers the women who protested the excessive use of mastectomies and takes a highly critical view of "race for the cure" programs. Speaking at the post-screening discussion, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Coalition's Vernal Branch said that "Twenty years of fundraising for research on treatment has resulted in only incremental improvements -- a few weeks or months more of life. What we need is research on the environmental causes of breast cancer and prevention."

In addition to the post-screening discussions, the Impact Project "takes the films off campus," adds festival director Gittens. "The filmmakers talk with students in the schools and connect with associations that are working on the issues raised in the film. And this year, we're going to Capitol Hill with Brothers on the Line, which is about the United Auto Workers and the history of the labor movement. Representative John Conyers has arranged a screening with members of Congress: you can only do that in D.C.!"

-- Kathryn Pyle

Geena Davis Institute Asks: Where Are the Good Roles for Women?

(Laura Cronin is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about the Wikimedia Foundation's first Public Policy Initiative.)

As we get ready for the Academy Awards on Sunday, it's interesting to think about the relationship of pop and celebrity culture to social change.

The average foundation manager working to move the needle for a cause can only envy the ways in which celebrities are able to generate attention for their favorite issues. A short speech from a prominent figure on the red carpet is a surefire route to getting your cause trending on Twitter.

This year's Academy Award-nominated films are packed with issues that foundation and nonprofit people are concerned about: inequality, children and families, race, gender, sexual violence, politics. And I'm not just talking about documentaries.

Unfortunately, good roles for strong women are rare. That depressing fact turned Oscar (The Accidental Tourist) and Golden Globe (Commander in Chief) winner Geena Davis into an advocate. Watching television and movies with her young daughter a decade ago, Davis became concerned about the representation of women in most children's media. In 2004, the actress founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media and commissioned a study by Dr. Stacy Smith of the USC Annenberg School of Communications & Journalism which found a huge, 3:1 gender gap in roles for men and women. The study also concluded that even G-rated films transmit negative messages about girls -- messages which not only affect children in the U.S. but, given Hollywood's global reach, are exported to the rest of the world. The institute raises money for research, advocates for change, and develops educational materials that schools can use to help children think beyond stereotypes, including a recently piloted video learning series about gender and the workplace called Guess Who?

It also believes that pop culture is not just a mirror of our world but a driver of attitudes, and that positive gender portrayals break down stereotypes and broaden children's aspirations. According to the institute's executive director, Madeline Di Nonno, what children see on a screen truly matters. It shapes their emotional and social development and their beliefs. The more they see female characters who are hyper-sexualized, sidelined, or not present at all, the more boys and girls will think that's the way it's supposed to be.

So whether you stay up all night with Billy Crystal to see who gets to bring home a golden statue or turn in early, the Geena Davis Institute hopes you'll spend a few minutes thinking about how women and girls are portrayed on the silver screen.

-- Laura Cronin

'Freedom Riders': Lessons for a New Generation

(Kathryn Pyle is a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic. In October, she spoke with Orlando Bagwell, director of the Ford Foundation's recently launched JustFilms initiative. She first blogged about Freedom Riders in February of 2010.)

Writing from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival about the civil rights movement as captured in documentary films, I highlighted Freedom Riders, a documentary directed by Stanley Nelson that premiered at the festival. The film tells the story of the hundreds of courageous people, most of them young, who participated in the 1961 "freedom rides" that helped end segregation in the South.

Freedom Riders aired on PBS this past May; the film went on to earn three Emmy Awards and the New York Times, calling it "beautifully constructed," selected it as one of the ten best programs of the year. The broadcast was preceded by a ten-day reenactment of the original 1961 campaign that was organized by American Experience, the PBS program which had commissioned and broadcast the film. "Get on the Bus" brought together forty college students from around the country to reenact the rides -- from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans -- and interact along the way with some of the original freedom riders, various historians of the period, and community activists. As they made their way south, the kids shared their experience via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools.

"The re-creation campaign had high visibility and great partnerships with state humanities councils, colleges and universities, and museums around the country," says Sonya Childress, community engagement specialist at Firelight Media, the nonprofit partner of Firelight Films, Nelson's for-profit production company. The former organizes audience outreach programs -- a letter-writing campaign for Nelson's film The Murder of Emmett Till helped reopen a criminal investigation into that 1955 case -- and supports emerging documentarians through a producers' lab.

" 'Get on the Bus' was very successful," Childress adds, "but we at Firelight wanted to do something different. We saw our job as bringing the film to a different audience -- particularly youth, and including African-Americans, but people who weren't necessarily connected to the civil rights movement. In targeting youth groups, we immediately thought of the Dream Act, because the story of Freedom Riders is a story about multi-ethnic organizing. We wanted to reach people working on immigration reform who do not see the civil rights movement as part of their history or as relevant to their activism. And we wanted to help them use the film in their own campaigns."

Atlantic Philanthropies, the Open Society Foundations (through its Campaign for Black Male Achievement), and the National Black Programming Consortium were approached and ultimately funded the Firelight Media project.

"Many funders could have said the freedom ride reenactment was sufficient as an audience engagement component," notes Childress. "But these three organizations saw value in bringing the history to a new community. They understood that Firelight Films makes historical documentaries, but that we want to show that the lessons of the past can be dissected and discussed and applied to today. Also, the funders recognized that, being an independent entity, Firelight Media had the latitude to work with a wider variety of community groups than had been involved in 'Get on the Bus', and that was seen as a complement to the American Experience project."

Engaging foundations that are not "media" funders is a new strategy for many documentary filmmakers; the challenge is in helping private and corporate foundations see that film can further their grantmaking priorities, and that there are many points of entry for support beyond a film's production phase.

At the same time, as foundations become more engaged in distribution there is more concern around evaluation of the project's goals. In Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact, a new Ford Foundation-supported publication from the Center for Social Media, Jessica Clark and Barbara Abrash put it this way:

In an environment of information overload and polarized sparring, social issue documentaries provide quality content that can be used to engage members of the public as citizens rather than merely media consumers. As a result, they have gained in visibility, influence and number over the past decade.

But despite the box-office and critical success of high-profile examples such as An Inconvenient Truth or Supersize Me, the social impacts of such expensive, long- range projects have been hit-or-miss. As a result, investors and filmmakers are asking tough questions about how best to plan for and assess the impact of such films and related engagement strategies, and to create models and standards for a dynamic field....

The report proposes a systemic approach based on early and continuous community participation that combines quantitative and qualitative indicators and continuous feedback into the evaluation design. The best indicators measure "evidence of [the film's] quality, increased public awareness, meaningful partnerships, increased public engagement, and collective action."

Firelight Media's plan for Freedom Riders incorporated many of those elements, though as noted by the Center for Social Media report, each documentary project is distinct.

Firelight began by convening a small group of civic organizations to help develop ideas for a year-long project; by the time Freedom Riders was broadcast, the project was ready to go. (An agreement with American Experience required that the Firelight project not overlap with "Get on the Bus," which took place immediately before the film aired.)

Sixteen community-based organizations and student groups -- some national and some local -- were selected as formal partners. Seven of the smallest groups received stipends to carry out their activities. All agreed to screen the film and use an online guide, United in Courage (available on the Firelight Media site), to help plan events and facilitate discussions. Their experiences are being disseminated via an e-news broadcast to other partners, funders and filmmakers, and through Firelight Media’s newsletter; in effect, the partners provide ongoing feedback as a way to strengthen the project.

The groups include established organizations like the NAACP, which is bringing some of the original freedom riders to college campuses in the South for screenings and conversations. Puente Arizona has invited some of the freedom riders to discuss immigration reform strategies with members of the migrant communities with which it works. At a workshop on audience engagement earlier this fall in San Francisco, another partner, Bay Area-based Youth Speaks, described using the film at its annual Brave New Voices event, which brings young poets and youth development organizations together: five hundred spoken-word artists attended the screening and a subsequent conversation, later broadcast on Pacifica Radio, with two freedom riders. And New York City-based Brotherhood/Sister Sol showed the film in New York and Ghana and trained youth facilitators to lead post-screening talks. (A complete list of partners and their plans can be found on the "United in Courage" site.)

Recognizing that short films can be useful for community organizing and in educational settings, especially those involving children, Firelight Media produced a twenty-minute version of the film (available only to project partners) and also commissioned three ten-minute films on key issues in the current immigration policy debate. Immigration: Beyond the Headlines was supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and can be viewed on the Firelight Media site. Though apprehensive at first that the films would be seen as standalone media, Firelight staff now consider them to be useful vehicles for driving interested viewers to the longer and more comprehensive film.

Today, halfway through the year-long audience engagement effort, Firelight's independent evaluator is tracking how the full-length documentary is being used and the kind of impact it is having through pre- and post-screening interviews with various partners. The partners also submit formal reports on how they are using the film to enhance their work, in the process creating a repository of "best practices."

"Community organizations have varying levels of comfort with documentary films that are not 'advocacy' films, that are not prescriptive in terms of what to do about a particular issue," says Childress. "Freedom Riders is not a 'call to action'; it's an occasion for reflection. We're interested in knowing how community groups navigate that, how they challenge themselves and how they incorporate films into their programs. We want to know how this particular story resonates, especially within the immigrant rights movement that's looking for stories and trying to build relationships with other movements. The big question for us is: Can historical documentaries move the meter; can this content help people understand the current world?"

The anecdotal evidence is encouraging. Last month, as reported by the Montgomery Advertiser, "Two Freedom Riders who risked their lives to integrate Montgomery's bus station 50 years ago are back in the Capital City with a new cause: repealing Alabama's immigration law. The Rev. C.T. Vivian and Catherine Burks-Brooks joined a rally on the Capitol steps and a children’s march to the governor's mansion."

Some of the Firelight project's results to date are posted on its Web site in the form of testimony from the partners. We'll check back at the end of the year to see what lessons were learned and how they can inform the marriage between documentary film and community activism.

-- Kathryn Pyle

2011 Year in Review: Foundations Bet Big on New Initiatives

Global, public-private, collaboration, thinking big -- these were some of the themes in play as foundations sought to boost their impact while addressing some of the most pressing challenges at home and abroad in 2011.

In the field of international development, the Chevron-sponsored Niger Delta Partnership Initiative Foundation and USAID pledged $50 million in February to support programs that promote economic development, improve the capacity of government and civil society institutions, and help reduce conflict in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. A month later, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation announced a five-year, $50 million commitment to help improve water conditions for more than one million people in sub-Saharan Africa and areas of India and Mexico -- a commitment that included a grant to the Foundation Center to build an online portal to serve as a central hub for information about water-related issues. In July, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation stepped up its own commitment to WASH issues by awarding grants totaling $41 million in support of efforts to increase access to affordable long-term sanitation solutions for millions of people in the developing world. And in October, George Soros and the Open Society Foundations pledged $27.4 million to the Millennium Villages Project to boost development in villages across rural sub-Saharan Africa.

Closer to home, a number of foundations announced major initiatives benefitting underserved communities and vulnerable populations. In April, the Home Depot Foundation launched a three-year, $30 million initiative to address veterans' housing issues; in May, the New York City-based NoVo Foundation announced a ten-year, $80 million initiative to strengthen the movement to end violence against women and girls; and in July, the California Endowment announced the creation of a $200 million public-private loan fund, the California FreshWorks Fund, to support efforts to increase access to healthy and affordable food in underserved communities.

Filmmakers and performing artists also were beneficiaries of bold thinking on the part of foundations in 2011. In January, the New York City-based Ford Foundation committed $50 million over five years to help identify and support a new generation of documentary filmmakers; in February, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, announced a $60 million documentary film initiative of its own; and in October, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation announced a ten-year, $50 million commitment to support more than two hundred individual artists in the field of jazz, theater, and contemporary dance.

Finally, in the area of health and health care, in September the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation's largest healthcare philanthropy, announced the launch of a three-year, $100 million "impact" fund to help its grantees leverage additional funding from multiple sources and share solutions that actually improve health and health care for all Americans. As part of the effort, RWJF awarded $10 million to NCB Capital Impact, a national Community Development Finance Institution (and the program administrator for the California Endowment's FreshWorks Fund), to create a low-interest credit facility that will support the development of Green House nursing homes over the next ten years.

"Our goal with this initiative is to go beyond traditional grantmaking, to drive social change, achieve measurable impact, and collaborate with partners who can help us achieve our mission," said RWJF president and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. "This commitment allows us to better leverage our funding and spread innovative models, like the Green House Project."

Related Links

Ford Foundation Announces $50 Million for Documentary Film Initiative (1/19/11)

HHMI Launches Documentary Film Unit (2/08/11)

Chevron, USAID Pledge $50 Million to Improve Living Standards in Nigeria (2/21/11)

Hilton Foundation Commits $50 Million to Help Improve Global Water Conditions (3/23/11)

Home Depot Foundation Launches $30 Million Initiative to Address Veterans' Housing Issues (4/14/11)

NoVo Foundation Establishes $80 Million Initiative to End Violence Against Women and Girls (5/20/11)

Latin American Water Funds Launched With $27 Million in Funding (6/15/11)

Gates Foundation Announces $42 Million to Address Global Sanitation Issues (7/20/11)

California Endowment Announces $200 Million Public-Private Loan Fund (7/22/11)

Rockefeller Foundation, Partners Launch Initiative on Role of Philanthropy in International Development (8/10/11)

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Establishes $100 Million Impact Capital Fund (9/12/11)

Soros Pledges $27.4 Million to Aid Development in Rural Africa (10/04/11)

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Commits $50 Million to Support Individual Artists (10/21/11)

A Q&A With Orlando Bagwell, Director, JustFilms Initiative (Part 2)

This week, the Ford Foundation officially launches JustFilms, a new initiative designed to expand support for social issue documentary films. Announced last winter at the Sundance Film Festival, JustFilms will provide $50 million over the next five years to fund the creation of social issue docs and help build effective audience engagement programs around them.

In August, frequent PhilanTopic contributor Kathryn Pyle spoke with the initiative's director, Orlando Bagwell, about the new effort and how it relates to Ford's broader agenda, as well as his twenty-five-year career as a documentary filmmaker.

In part two of the interview, below, Pyle talks with Bagwell about key features of the initiative, including its partnerships with the Sundance Institute, ITVS, and the Tribeca Film Institute, as well as the audience engagement strategies it hopes to pursue. To read part one, click here.

Kathryn Pyle: JustFilms will be carrying out its program in a number of interesting ways. One is working with external partners, including the Sundance Institute, Independent Television Service, and the Tribeca Film Institute. Why those three organizations?

Orlando Bagwell: Those three organizations are our signature partners, and about a third of our funds will go to them. The Sundance Institute is a major influence in the documentary field, and not only because of the Sundance Film Festival. We really believe in their workshops, and that's a part of what JustFilms is supporting: the various labs they offer to grantees in script writing, producing, directing, editing, and composing. The workshops really improve the skills of filmmakers and improve the films they bring to the workshop. It's a model we want to replicate in other places.

Another part of that partnership, and a feature of our partnership with ITVS as well, is the ability of these organizations to reach out to filmmakers we wouldn't normally have access to. As a foundation, we're interested in how we can bring more voices to the conversation around issues that are important to us. And I mean the global conversation. We're well aware that most of the filmmakers who are making films about issues that are important to us are from Europe and the United States. But if we're talking about global issues that affect all of us, that conversation has to be broader.

Our strength as a foundation is that we have deep relationships in other parts of the world, and we want to take advantage of those relationships. We want to be in places where we can have those conversations with people and something is triggered and they say, "Well, I can make a story about that." Yes, it's a filmmaker's story, but if it's done well it can engage the public and bring all sorts of people to the issue. Especially this year, the first year of the initiative, we want to design a way to raise up the voices of storytellers in the global South to comment on the rest of the world, not just their own countries or regions. That's going to take time, but we're committed to building that kind of expertise and that kind of storytelling.

However, we don't feel that all the best ideas come through our office, so with Sundance and ITVS we can fund films that we might otherwise miss and see projects that we wouldn't otherwise see. For instance, although the majority of Sundance Institute's funds go to U.S. filmmakers, maybe 40 percent goes to filmmakers overseas. With ITVS, we were actually the initial funder for the International Media Development Fund, which supports filmmakers in other parts of the world and brings their content to the United States. It's a way to encourage more stories from the rest of the world. We supported both Sundance and ITVS prior to JustFilms, so we're continuing those relationships, but we're looking to help them expand programs that are important to us.

The Tribeca Film Institute is a new partner of ours, and our support for them is for a transmedia fund. The fund is a way to think about how documentary film finds its way into the much larger digital storytelling space. How do you begin to think about the many different ways in which documentary film gets translated into new products? The majority of products will come out of the films themselves, but there might be new ones that are related to the film but are not necessarily part of the film, for example, a game based on the film. But, again, all this is tied to a clear sense of what the outcomes are that you're looking for. Whatever we're creating as a transmedia strategy is really aligned to certain outcomes that are part of an earlier filmmaking strategy.

KP: So the partnership with Tribeca will be exclusively transmedia work, in contrast to your support for ITVS and Sundance?

OB: Yes, it's a transmedia fund that will be managed by Tribeca. It really comes out of our early work with the Bay Area Video Coalition and their Producers Institute for New Media Technologies. In our conversations with Tribeca, we learned that this kind of capacity-building is something they wanted to do as well. It will create a space that's as much impact-focused as it is focused on thinking through the implications of new media and technology for filmmakers.

KP: Will you be expanding the partners beyond Sundance, Tribeca, and ITVS?

OB: We're in negotiations with other groups that can complement those three signature partners. Groups that can provide emergency grants, smaller grants, grants that seed ideas, that help engage filmmakers with audiences. We’ll be looking for organizations that can do some of that work with us. We're also creating partnerships to support shorter films and different film genres. And because we realize that when you validate a young filmmaker as a filmmaker, you're often launching them into a career, we're thinking about at a small kind of award to acknowledge the work of next-generation filmmakers as a way of saying, "Yeah, we're looking at you, and we think you're the real deal. Keep it up." So we're considering re-granting through other organizations, on a modest scale, that are doing that kind of work.

KP: In addition to working through partner organizations, JustFilms will provide direct support for films. What's the process for identifying those films?

OB: JustFilms includes a fund that's intended to complement the Ford Foundation's ongoing work in different areas and enables program officers here to think about the potential of films and media with respect to the issues they are dealing with. For instance, I was talking with a colleague in the criminal justice area about the alarming incarceration statistics in the United States. So we began looking at projects we could work on together that would fit with the multi-level approach she's taking in her work. This year we'll launch this new component with three films currently in production. One, by Eugene Jarecki, is about the growth of the prison industry and how it evolved from a correctional system into an industry. The second film came about because we were looking for a film that could humanize an incarcerated person, and we found an interesting film about an artist and her project with an inmate who's been in solitary confinement for a long time; it's called Herman's House, by Angad Bhalla. And the third film, Gideon's Army, by Dawn Porter, is about public defenders. What does it mean to be a public defender in an environment characterized by high incarceration rates? What kinds of impediments keep them from being effective? Do we believe that public defenders could be like a new Peace Corps? The biggest obstacle for young lawyers who want to be public defenders are their student loans! How do you begin to address that? You don't want to lose people who are committed to this work, so we need to bring those issues to light.

These three films are part of a cluster and represent the first piece in our collaboration. Now we're thinking about the public engagement piece; what are some of the outcomes we're looking for and how do they fit into my colleague's broader strategy?

KP: Are you funding an organization that will work with all three filmmakers on audience engagement strategies? Or do you expect each filmmaker to develop that on his or her own?

OB: No, we’ll work with an organization, Active Voice, to think about the strategic plan that's going to drive the public engagement work. Each film might have a very specific kind of group working with them -- aligning it around a very clear strategy for intervening in prisons, for instance. The issue of prisons as job creators in small towns and communities around the country is a complicated one, and how you engage people with different things at stake in the prison-as-industry debate requires a lot of sensitivity and expertise.

KP: So one of the key features of the JustFilms initiative will be the focus on partner organizations, and a second will be the work done inside Ford to integrate a documentary film strategy into specific program areas, with an underlying theme of expanding support for filmmakers outside the U.S.?

OB: Yes. But we realize that certain projects don't fit into existing foundation initiatives, so the last piece is an open fund to support documentary films that have a social justice theme. In fact, a third of our resources will be dedicated to that fund. The announcement that Ford was making this level of commitment in the documentary field is significant, and it's not just significant because of the money, but because it acknowledges the importance of nonfiction storytelling/films in the larger public discourse and the arena of ideas.

There were two headlines that came out of Sundance last winter when we announced JustFilms. One was Ford's five-year commitment to the initiative. And the other was Oprah saying that she was going to do for documentaries what she did for books. I think the two statements say something about the public's desire for real stories, independently told stories, as well as the generally sorry state of public discourse at this particular moment. They also say something about trust, or the lack thereof. It's not that people trust everything they see or hear in a documentary film. But I think they understand that most documentaries are a reflection of an independent voice and sensibility. And that makes them an important part of the larger conversation that is happening at any given moment. In an increasingly complicated world, we need those voices and that sensibility.

-- Kathryn Pyle

A Q&A With Orlando Bagwell, Director, JustFilms Initiative (Part 1)

This week, the Ford Foundation officially launches JustFilms, a new initiative designed to expand support for social issue documentary films. Announced last winter at the Sundance Film Festival, JustFilms will provide $50 million over the next five years to fund the creation of social issue docs and help build effective audience engagement programs around them.

In August, frequent PhilanTopic contributor Kathryn Pyle spoke with the initiative's director, Orlando Bagwell, about the new effort and how it relates to Ford's broader agenda, as well as his twenty-five-year career as a documentary filmmaker, which includes serving as a lead producer for the award-winning Eyes on the Prize series, four Emmy Awards, three George Peabody Awards, and the 1994 New York Film Festival Grand Prize.

Bagwell joined the Ford Foundation in 2004 as a program officer focused primarily on support for public media and subsequently led the foundation's Global Perspectives in a Digital Age, Advancing Public Service Media initiative. He later served as director of the foundation's Freedom of Expression unit before being tapped in 2010 to establish and lead the JustFilms initiative.

Kathryn Pyle: I came across a piece by Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media in which she quoted you as telling a new cohort of Public Media Corps fellows and their mentors that "story is essential in public media," but that in light of today's technology "you can and must go beyond the making of stories, to connect people to each other; to have the kinds of conversations they need to have." I thought that was an apt quote in terms of JustFilms' mission and your own career as a filmmaker involved in projects that got people talking to each other. Can you explain the convergence between stories well told and what we are now calling "audience engagement"?

Orlando Bagwell: My first involvement with public television was with Eyes on the Prize and Blackside, Henry Hampton's production company. As a young filmmaker I'd done small independent films, but nothing on that scale. I was consumed in many ways by the challenge to produce on that level and to take on a history that included so many people with a vested interest in how it was told and represented. Public television was the only space at the time where something like Eyes on the Prize could be incubated, and I think all of us who were producers on the series were kind of overwhelmed by the challenge.

The interesting thing was that we had no idea how people would respond to it -- and it turned out to be an immediate response. When it first came on the air, I was in China shooting a film. I got a call from the States and was told, "Your phone is ringing off the hook!" That really was an indication of how hungry people were for the kind of storytelling we were doing and the way that storytelling spoke to such a large cross-section of America. It wasn't just a story for the African-American community or the news media or civil rights activists. It was a series that engaged everyone, and it quickly became a part of history itself, which is how Henry had planned it. It was meant to be an American moment that people had a stake in.

At the same time, the response also made us realize we had an opportunity to engage in a conversation that we hadn't really anticipated. People immediately began to ask, "How do I use this? What do I do with this? How can it be a part of learning in the classroom?" But they were also asking how we were going to be involved in facilitating the conversation that was taking place around the series. And this was twenty years after the civil rights movement.

We realized we had missed something in the process of making the program: that films had the potential to have enormous impact and that somehow, in some way, the process of thinking about what a film could do, what it could mean, needed to be embedded in the film from the beginning. The immediate question was how do we facilitate and engage a conversation about Eyes on the Prize that would bring unlikely people into a room to share not only their own thoughts about the movement but what that history means today.

My experience with Eyes on the Prize really influenced how I approached films from then on. If you look at the programs I did through PBS after that, especially the series work, you'll see a really strong outreach and public engagement piece.

One of the core funders of Eyes on the Prize was the Ford Foundation, and Andrea Taylor, who managed the media program at Ford at the time, was very much present at Blackside as we were moving the series through production. She recognized that there was something going on, something that represented another piece of what documentaries could be in people's lives, the engagement end of it. And she challenged us to think critically about what materials and tools were needed to work with that aspect and how to organize it. That made an impression on all of us as filmmakers.

Over the years, Ford not only supported a lot of my film projects but also supported the engagement piece. I looked for other funders who had an interest -- not just in the production side but in the larger public conversation and how a film could reach beyond an expected audience. So when I came to the foundation in 2004, I arrived not only with a clear sense of the power of storytelling to impact people's lives, but also with a real commitment to take advantage of that, to bring people together to engage in a conversation rather than letting them remain in their separate spaces. I want people who have very different positions on an issue, people who in fact have a stake in the stories, to reconsider their relationship with the issue and with other people. That is the real opportunity.

Of course, by 2004 the whole landscape had changed in terms of how you did outreach. You were still able to convene people in an analog way -- through television -- but you also had new digital platforms, and that's a big part of what my Ford colleagues and I think about today.

KP: Clearly, there is more interest on the part of both funders and audience in documentaries, and one explanation is that there are fewer resources and less space for in-depth coverage of complex topics in the media.

OB: Part of the change is that documentaries are much more available now. People can watch them at their leisure. Being able to find the films you want to see, for example the online services offered by PBS and others where you can download or stream films, allows people to come to documentaries on their own terms. You don't have to tune in at a certain time to see it; you don't have to go to a movie theater an hour away.

There's also just greater interest in independent documentaries -- and I say independent because I think there continues to be a very strong collection of documentaries that exist in the television space; HBO's a good example. These are documentaries that are pretty diverse in terms of what they talk about and how they're done. But they're not all "independent" in terms of their financing. And because we've been exposed to more and more documentaries, I think the public is developing an appreciation for and more confidence in the independent voice.

KP: There seem to be more foundations and corporate funders supporting different pieces of documentary filmmaking and audience engagement today. What has been your experience, as a grantmaker, in terms of finding partners who share your vision with respect to social issue documentaries? How do you see that landscape changing in terms of other funders and filmmakers, many of whom have been trained to make films and not to think about how they're going to be used to engage an audience around an issue? And where are nongovernmental organizations in the equation?

OB: One of the big growth areas in the philanthropic sector related to documentary films is grantmakers who have a very particular expertise in public engagement. There are grantmakers who are very much tied to what might be called the traditional public broadcasting model. They recognize the value of PBS affiliates as vehicles for convening local audiences and drawing them in to activities such as public screenings. Then, after the screenings, they organize conversations around the film and suggest ways that people can become involved in the issue, creating a network of audience members in the process.

There are also new organizations, NGOs, using social networking tools to explore not only how to amplify issues raised in conversations sparked by a film, but also how to use technology to convene people in a virtual space in order to have those conversation. You have projects created by organizations like Cause & Affect, which is handling The Bully Project, a documentary film that's part of an advocacy and education program. [Ed note: The film is funded by the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust and the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention, among other groups.] These organizations and others like them are exploring how to use new technology to change the language and conversation around particular issues and how to use films to help make that change.

The challenge for filmmakers is finding an NGO partner interested in using film to drive impact. And I'm of two minds on this. I believe in the impact, but I also believe in the purity of the work. I recognize that making films is really hard work. And I see filmmakers being pulled in lots of different directions. It's really hard to raise money to finish a film, and at the end of the day that's the core piece that's going to allow all these other things we've been talking about to happen.

We want to organize JustFilms so that filmmakers do what they do best, which is to tell stories. That's why we're going to continue to give direct support for making films. But at the same time there's got to be a clear audience-engagement strategy. What are the outcomes you're looking for? What are the key measures of success in year one with respect to the media? How about year two? What kinds of policy changes are you hoping to effect? What about behavioral changes? How can the film make an impact in the public space?

You want that product -- the documentary -- to be as strong as possible, because that's the lead piece of the larger project in a sense; that's the door that opens other doors. The key part of any public engagement effort is that you have a clear strategy in terms of the kinds of outcomes you're looking for. It doesn't mean they might not change, but you've got to be clear about them in order to know whether they should change.

Your best bet is the analog approach I talked about before, the traditional public broadcasting model, where you're trying to bring people together and create a core to get to the next piece. You want to build a cadre of people who are going to be activists on the ground doing things you know need to be done. At the same time, maybe your online effort is being driven by an outcome related to policy change or public support around a referendum that could have a real impact on your issue. At the core of the process, these questions all help the filmmaker to make the critical decisions about who they work with and at what stage they begin to incorporate different approaches to public engagement.

KP: You seem to be describing a continuum of sorts. At one end are documentaries about important issues that simply describe the issue of concern but without advocating for any change. Moving along the continuum, you might have the same film that with the right support from a local television station, a network, or an NGO could be a catalyst for the advocacy piece. And even further along are films that begin with a social change agenda. How will JustFilms work with filmmakers to move them along that continuum?

OB: One way to support that process is the Good Pitch, which is a forum for filmmakers where they can present their film to a group of funders, issue experts, and activists who understand that it's all about the larger project -- namely, connecting audiences to the film's message. The discussion then is about the value and potential of the project to drive change and about what partnerships are needed to create the desired impact. Whether the films are in production or are finished, in that moment you begin to get a sense of how people outside the film see the work. Often the conversation comes around to ways the film could have impact or reach audiences the filmmaker hadn't imagined. Of course, it also takes time from the making of the film because the filmmaker has to invest two weeks of his or her time to prepare for the event!

KP: I understand that with support from Ford as well as the Tides Foundation, the Fledgling Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Impact Partners, the CrossCurrents Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation, there are three Good Pitch events scheduled this year. What, in your mind, is the right balance between support for the films and support for finding and building audiences that are then moved to take action? What’s a good model for enabling both?

OB: Within the Ford Foundation, I can collaborate with people who have expertise in different issue areas, so a lot of my internal work is aligning storytelling with a social change strategy. We can invest in that first-stage strategy consideration, defining the outcomes that we might be looking for. But we don't want to move further in terms of the outreach funding, because in the philanthropic world there are very few of us who really support film production, and support it from a storytelling point of view. In other words, it’s not the issue we’re interested in primarily, it's the product itself -- the film plus the engagement and how they fit in the social change equation.

Outside Ford, there are many funders who will support the use of the film because they have a vested interest in an issue. We see our role as helping to identify those partners. But the way to bring them in is to have a clear strategy for what you want to do with your film. That's important....

(Click here for part two.)

-- Kathryn Pyle

Community Engagement and Social Justice Documentaries

(Kathryn Pyle is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about Film and the "Dirty War.")

Crime After Crime is a new documentary that describes a fault line in our justice system -- and is actively engaged, as a larger project, in trying to change it. The film was one of two to receive the Henry Hampton Award at the Council on Foundations' Film and Video Festival, presented in collaboration with Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media, at the council's recent annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Deborah Peagler, the subject of Crime After Crime, was brutally abused by her boyfriend over a number of years, beginning when she was 15; fearing for the lives of her children and herself, and with no recourse to legal remedies, Peagler turned to friends and family for protection and was implicated in his subsequent murder. Eventually, she was sentenced to 25 years-to-life in prison. (It's estimated that as many as four thousand women are currently in prison for killing their abusers.)

At the time of Peagler's conviction, in 1983, domestic violence wasn't recognized as a mitigating factor in the prosecution of victims who commit crimes against their abusers. Twenty years later, thanks to the efforts of a coalition of women's organizations, including a group of women inmates, things have changed. According to Marisa F. González, coordinator of the California Habeas Project, which recruits, trains, and assigns pro-bono lawyers to cases: "In 1989, a group of women at the California Institution for Women got together to found Convicted Women Against Abuse, the first prisoner-led support group for battered women in the country. Advocates in the anti-domestic violence movement heard about the group's efforts and began recruiting lawyers to help each woman file an individual clemency petition, giving details and evidence about the abuse she had experienced and its relevance to her criminal conviction."

A new organization, the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison (now Free Battered Women), was formed to lead a movement to challenge the laws. A variety of funders provided support, including the Fund for Nonviolence, the San Francisco Foundation, Eileen Fisher, Inc., the Five Bridges Foundation, the Women's Foundation of California, and the van Loeben Sels/Rembe Rock Foundation, among others.

As a result of those efforts, in 2002 California became the first state to recognize a history of domestic abuse as a legitimate defense and to allow the cases of convicted victims to be reopened. Through the Habeas Project, two young lawyers took up Peagler's case and discovered a labyrinth of missteps and corruption in her original conviction, as well as inexplicable foot-dragging with respect to reopening her case. The film follows the dogged work of the legal team and Peagler's fortitude as her appeal goes through a series of unexpected ups-and-downs over the course of five long years.

"I became interested in Debbie's story through a friend, one of the two pro-bono lawyers who were working on her case," says director Yoav Potash. "Over time, I realized that the film could help free her and that she was part of a larger community." The Sundance Documentary Film Program, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film at the Foundation for Jewish Culture are the major funders of the film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year and has gone on to win awards at national and international festivals since then.

Marion Dienstag, director of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, which supports artists and scholars exploring Jewish traditions, told me at the Council on Foundations screening that "Crime After Crime interested us because one of the lawyers in the film, a religious Jewish man, is shown living his faith -- not only through practicing Judaism but also through his commitment to justice, which is a part of Jewish teachings to 'repair the world'."

As its popularity at festivals attests, Crime After Crime is an example of how documentary films are meeting a demand for in-depth stories about important issues. But popularity isn't the only goal. "A film is never over when it's done, especially a documentary about social change," says Potash. "We're just beginning to use the tools we've created." The Web site for the film includes a discussion guide, a list of organizations working on issues addressed in the film, and information on how to advocate for better laws and public policies. A Fledgling Fund grant enabled the filmmakers to launch Debbie's Campaign, a national initiative to promote laws and policies similar to the California law, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture has helped identify partner organizations.

There are a number of issues in this case -- and, as a consequence, a number of audiences for the film, primarily domestic violence organizations but also bar associations and young lawyers groups. "We are working with advocates in several targeted states who know the local situation and have a clear idea of what is needed there," says Potash. "One goal is to broaden parole boards' definition of 'abuse' to really reach the population of victims. It's estimated that 80 percent of women in prison are victims of domestic violence."

Long-time film festival programmer Linda Blackaby, in a post on her National Alliance for Media Art + Culture blog, notes that "while filmmakers have always networked energetically with activist grassroots groups and non-governmental organizations, recent developments in digital technology greatly expand the potential for accessibility, reach and speed of their communications. Anyone who has attended a session of The Good Pitch has seen firsthand the increasingly sophisticated communities of funders, broadcasters, NGOs, organizations and activist grassroots groups that come together in support of individual film projects."

Crime After Crime is also at the forefront of a more aggressive audience engagement movement within the documentary film world. It was one of five films featured in the 2011 Filmfest DC's "Justice Matters" series, created two years ago by festival director Tony Gittens and curated by Blackaby. The series highlights the use of film -- both narratives and documentaries -- to expand awareness of social justice issues. The CrossCurrents Foundation funded the series' juried award, which Crime After Crime captured.

As part of the series, the "Impact Project" (funded by the Wyncote Foundation) works to develop program and engagement activities for selected films. Crime After Crime was partnered with the Washington, D.C.-based Pro-Bono Institute and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights for a post-screening discussion. "We want groups like this to see the film and then to define what the next steps might be to address the issues," says Potash. "The festival provided an excellent platform for us to begin national outreach to nonprofits and community groups, which we are now expanding as the film arrives in theaters from coast to coast."

Several other film festivals are creating community links for social issues films. In another blog post, Blackaby praised the community engagement program developed by the Cleveland International Film Festival, which also screened Crime After Crime. At each screening, CIFF distributes a Lights! Camera! Action Steps! handout showing audience members how to get involved after the screening, including connecting with local organizations.

The experience of Crime After Crime illustrates the growing interest in issue-based documentary films and the new possibilities they present for impact. The Ford Foundation's creation this year of JustFilms, a $50 million fund to support "filmed content with a social conscience" through film, video and digital works, will expand the number and quality of such films and encourage new approaches to their dissemination. In a subsequent post, I'll look at the foundation's partners in the initiative and how they're moving forward with the new program.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the Legal Services for Prisoners With Children site for more information about the process involved in changing California law as it relates to incarcerated survivors of domestic violence.

-- Kathryn Pyle

Film and the 'Dirty War'

(Kathryn Pyle is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her previous post, she wrote about the Film and Video Festival at this year's Council on Foundations conference.)

How would you like your new Web site to get 40,000 visits within two weeks of launch?

That's been the experience of Memoria Abierta, a Buenos Aires-based nongovernmental organization that is working to preserve the historic memory of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina and the so-called "dirty war" it waged against its political opponents. Earlier this month the organization published an online catalogue of films about the dictatorship, and the response has been overwhelming. Most visitors to the site have been from Argentina, but La Dictadura en el Cine ("The Dictatorship in the Movies") is open to any Spanish-speaker who wants to learn not just about what happened in Argentina but also how the terrible events of those years relate to similar situations elsewhere. Indeed, as post-conflict societies increasingly look to international courts for justice and search for local approaches to conflict resolution, knowledge about what happened in Argentina can be a crucial tool.

"We’ve wanted to do this project since we were founded more than a decade ago," Patricia Valdez, the director of Memoria Abierta, a coalition of four human rights groups working on various aspects of the junta's legacy, recently told me. "We knew there were a lot of films made about the history, both fiction and documentaries: we identified four hundred and fifty for the catalogue. And they continue to be made -- we found thirty-two new ones produced just last year! We also knew there was great demand to see these films and that many of them were not available." All the films in the catalogue can be viewed onsite at the organization's offices in Buenos Aires.

With funding from the Dutch embassy (as part of its efforts to encourage human rights programs in Argentina that promote transparency and accountability), the project finally got some traction last year. Two researchers (with assistance from other consultants and advisors) worked for over a year to identify films and track down copies. Films were selected on the basis of two criteria: that they dealt with the dictatorship, however obliquely; and that they had been publicly screened in a festival, a commercial theater, and/or a community center. The vast majority were made in Argentina, including many, like The Official Story, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1986, the first Latin American film to ever receive that honor, that are well known internationally.

"As far as we know, this catalogue is unique,” says Valdez. "And as an online publication, it can expanded and updated." There are film collections organized by ethnic/racial group and by historical event -- for example, the Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University and the Stephen Spielberg Film & Video Archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But films about a country suffering under dictatorship and then transitioning to democracy haven't been collected into a single location where they can be accessed by scholars, students, and the general public. "The Dictatorship in the Movies" would appear to be a first, and as such is an important contribution to the field of transitional justice.

The catalogue itself is organized, word-cloud style, by theme; clicking on one takes you to a selection of thumbnail images, which are linked in turn to additional information about that particular film. Click, for example, on the phrase "search for the disappeared" and you'll get a thumbnail and additional information about Our Disappeared, a 2008 documentary by Boston-area filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum about his search for childhood friends left behind when his family moved from Argentina to the U.S. (The film has been shown on PBS stations and in festivals around the world.)

Mandelbaum happens to be with me this week at the Flaherty Film Seminar at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. I asked him about the catalogue. "It's a fantastic resource. It is very broad, which is important. Even feature films that served as propaganda for the dictatorship and military training films are included."

(In fact, the only film that can be viewed online at the moment, I’m Wounded! Attack!, is a 21-minute propaganda film made by the military government in 1977 that was considered lost for many years.)

Paula Felix-Didier, director of the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducros Hicken in Buenos Aires, is also at the Flaherty seminar, where she has presented several rare short films of Argentine singer Carlos Gardel performing in 1930. Commenting on the catalogue, Felix-Didier tells me that "Argentina hasn't taken good care of our cultural heritage and historical memory. Memoria Abierta and other human rights groups have made a huge and successful effort to reclaim our memory, and the catalogue is one of the new information tools we have."

(Four filmmakers are among the disappeared in Argentina, and their works are included in the catalogue.)

With its rich history of film production and it's current role as a model for transitional justice, it's not surprising that Argentina has produced a catalogue like this. As Patricia Valdez says: "These films are a privileged language and vehicle for transmission in that they depict elements of personal and social trauma, and of institutional and political drama, that then become part of the memory and collective culture of a society."

-- Kathryn Pyle

Council on Foundation’s Film and Video Festival

(Kathryn Pyle is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her previous post, she wrote about memory as an instrument of peace.)

Attendees at this year's Council on Foundations conference (April 10–12) in Philadelphia will have the opportunity to view some excellent documentary films during the conference's Film and Video Festival. Held in cooperation with Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media (GFEM), the festival is a regular feature at the annual CoF conference and this year will feature a number of special screenings co-sponsored by council affinity groups like the International Human Rights Funders Group and Funders Together to End Homelessness. There will also be a presentation for funders on how to use short videos and other media to educate the public and explore community issues.

As I described in a previous post, documentary films are growing in popularity, both at festivals and via television and the Internet. Indeed, grantmakers and nongovernmental organizations increasingly grasp the potential of documentary films to tell their stories and advance their priorities -- not only in terms of traditional "public relations," but by conveying with deep-felt passion a subject or story that aligns with their own interests.

The Council on Foundations recognized the importance of film and video early on, launching a film and video festival ("in a closet," as Phil Hallen, formerly of the Falk Foundation, puts it) at an annual conference in the late 1960s. Today, the festival, a regular feature of the conference since then, is a juried exhibition of a dozen films with its own on-site screening room; conference participants can also borrow a DVD of any film to watch on their hotel television sets or their laptops.

For funders particularly interested in the impact of documentaries, the festival offers examples of how films can contribute to social change. Several years ago, I blogged about Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North, a featured documentary at the council's 2008 conference that explored the history of slavery in the North through the lens of a Rhode Island family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy as descendents of slave traders. At the time, the filmmakers created an extensive educational program around the film -- work now being carried out by the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery, which was founded in 2009 to advance the conversation sparked by the film.

At the 44th Film and Video Festival this weekend, three films have been selected for special attention.

On Saturday, April 9, Budrus, a documentary about a community organizer who unites Palestinians and Israelis to save his village from being razed, will be screened. The film is one of two at the festival that will be honored with the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film and Digital Media. Following the screening, producer Ronit Avni will join Elise Bernhardt, president of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, a funder of the film, for a discussion.

On Sunday, April 10, the second Henry Hampton Award winner will be screened. Crime After Crime is a documentary about a woman, Debbie Peagler, who killed her abusive partner. Such abuse is mandated by California law to be considered at sentencing but was not; the film follows a team of young lawyers who appeal Peagler's case. A national advocacy campaign around the issue of domestic violence and abuse is a component of the outreach associated with the film. Filmmaker Yoav Potash and Marion Dienstag, COO at the Foundation for Jewish Culture, a funder of the film, along with one of the lawyers and Peagler's daughter, will be present for the discussion.

A third film at the festival will feature a post-screening discussion as well: Lost Angels portrays life on the streets for denizens of Los Angeles' skid row, a diverse and eccentric population. Following the screening, representatives of Funders Together to End Homelessness will lead a discussion featuring Thomas Napper, the film's director, and producer Agi Orsi.

If you're in Philadelphia for the conference this weekend, be sure to check out one or all of the above. It will be time well spent. And for more information about the festival, click here.

-- Kathryn Pyle

Latin Side of the Doc (Part Two)

(Kathryn Pyle is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. Click here for the first installment of her two-part post.)

An all-day "webdoc" workshop at Latin Side of the Doc led by Hugues Sweeney, an advisor for digital programming at the National Film Board of Canada, stressed the possibilities of interactive documentaries. "Twenty percent of our shows are now interactive," Sweeney told those in attendance. "For documentaries, the Web can be more than just a dissemination avenue; it represents a merger of the traditional documentary form and a new interactive model." Indeed, the NFB Web site encourages people to "enjoy documentaries, animations, alternative dramas and interactive productions on the Web, on your personalized home page, or on your iPhone."

Various interactive sites were highlighted during the workshop, including the delightful Save the Words site developed by Oxford Dictionaries. With hundreds of words dropping out of regular usage each year, the site is an advocacy project that aims to save words "that once led meaningful lives," while challenging people to rebuild our shrinking vocabularies. (I guarantee that if you’re reading this, you’ll be hooked by the site.)

World Without Oil, described as a serious game designed to change the world, allows game players to create the "documentary" through e-mails, blog posts, Twitter, videos, and other social media channels. "The public is actively involved and implicated in the work through the act of influencing it," said Sweeney.

Hubert Fiasse, a filmmaker from Brussels, was particularly interested in the NFB workshop because Quizas, his small production company, is planning its first venture into a documentary made specifically for the Web. "It's complicated," Fiasse told me, "and very different than a traditional documentary. We're working with an IT person who has experience building Web sites, while we bring the content side."

Fiasse came to Latin Side of the Doc to stay on top of issues addressed by Latin American documentaries; he spent a year living in Mexico and another year traveling in the region, making several short films in the process. Last year, he attended an event in Senegal that was similar to Latin Side. His experiences have convinced him of the value of collaboration with local filmmakers. Indeed, he sees collaboration as an opportunity to help: by partnering with European or North American film companies, producers in developing countries -- where funding is scarce -- become eligible for production funds from governments in the developed world. Quizas, with two finished films to its credit and several more in production, is looking toward the next project. "The most important thing for me is the point of view of the filmmaker, wherever they are," Fiasse tells me. "They have to share my interest in social and political issues and give the subjects their own voices in the documentaries."

By the end of the week, Fiasse had found a new potential partner in Bolivian filmmaker Sergio Estrada. Estrada worked as a cameraman on documentaries for nearly two decades and formed a production company, Imago, with two other filmmakers in Cochabamba, Bolivia, four years ago. Their first film, Un Dia Mas, is about Bolivians who migrate to the United States for work and the impact of out-migration on their nearly deserted home town of Arbieto. They're now looking for funds to complete Night Inside Me, about miners and the spirits that inhabit the ancient mineshafts of Potosi, Bolivia.

The film received a grant from the Simon I. Patino Foundation, which was established in 1958 by the heirs of a Bolivian industrialist. Based in Geneva, the foundation supports projects in Latin America in the areas of education, culture, health, and ecology, with most funds going to Bolivia. "We are the first film grant the foundation has made, and they've given us 30 percent of the budget," Estrada told me. At Latin Side, Estrada is hoping to find a European or North American producer to partner with on the film. "And I"m looking for pre-sales, just like everyone else here!" He wasn't letting enthusiasm get the better of him, though. "I don't think that will happen this week, but a lot of people are interested. The representative of a French television channel has encouraged me to find a French distributor, which would allow them to consider supporting it. By French law, they can only take on films that have a French principle."

Collaboration with Hubert Fiasse would give Estrada a base for approaching other European funders. They share similar interests and aesthetics, he told me, and have pledged to continue to explore the possibility of collaboration after they leave Buenos Aires.

For French filmmakers Anne Moutot and Muriel Ponsolle, Latin Side of the Doc has been a positive and rewarding experience. Though both have had experience in other production companies, their Calisto Productions is fairly new and has a clear international focus: "We have to go beyond our borders," said Ponsolle. "The tendency in France is to stay inside." Their projects to date underscore that commitment: The Scar, an award-winning TV series, traces the actual path of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe while celebrating the memories and hopes of the people who lived on both sides of the divide. Another, a portrait of the Egyptian singer George Moustaki, will air next spring.

Calisto's current project, Adios Muchachos: Nicaragua, a Stolen Revolution, will follow three former revolutionaries turned dissidents under the Ortega government as the country prepares for presidential elections in 2011. Moutot and Ponsolle applied to Latin Side to pitch the film, but theirs was among the hundreds not selected (only twelve European projects were featured). They were, however, invited to attend and present their film in fifteen-minute individual meetings with broadcasters and funders -- what one participant referred to as the "speed dating" portion of the event.

When I checked in with the Calisto team at the end of the week, they were exhausted but exuberant. "We had twenty meetings in three days!" said Moutot. "Five or six were organized by Latin Side, but we requested the others directly with the decision-makers. Prior to coming here, we identified who we needed to meet and sent them materials by e-mail."

"We're tired but happy," added Ponsolle. "We reached our goal!" The duo secured four firm commitments from broadcasters that would cover half the remaining budget for the film and guarantee its exhibition in Latin America and Europe. "Of course, we don't have the signed contracts yet, so we'll follow up over the next week," said Moutot, "but we're very optimistic." They also met a producer from the U.S. who's a potential partner and who eventually could lead them to other U.S. broadcasters and funders.

"All the key players are here," said Moutot, "so there's also the opportunity for informal discussions; they talk among themselves, recommending projects to each other. Even the French broadcasters were easier to meet with here than in Paris!"

According to Yves Jeanneau, a French film producer who, with the help of Argentine partner INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), launched Latin Side last year, the reports he was hearing by the end of the event were very positive. "We're still expecting confirmations, but based on what I've heard from the decision-makers and some of the producers, many projects have gotten support. Nothing was signed here, of course, but decisions really were made." He mentioned that NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, made five pre-sales decisions and was considering another two projects. "It was a very active marketplace," said Jeanneau, "much more than last year in any market. It seems the financial crisis is no longer a reason for delaying decisions. This is the best news from Latin Side of the Doc!"

Documentary filmmakers everywhere hope he's right.

-- Kathryn Pyle

Latin Side of the Doc (Part One)

(Kathryn Pyle is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about the Art of Memory.)

Documentary film producers from Latin America and Europe gathered last week in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the second annual "Latin Side of the Doc," a four-day meet-up where independent filmmakers "pitch" their projects to European and North American broadcasters, distributors, and funders.  About 175 films -- all in the initial stages of development -- were presented, and I was there.

The documentaries are a window into the great and small issues of the region. Like the story from Bolivia of a member of the indigenous Aymara community who, when young, was forbidden by the government to learn Spanish, and his grandson, the filmmaker, who speaks Spanish but has never learned Aymara. The film promises to be a universal story of family and identity but also a particularly Latin American story of discrimination and assimilation.

"There is enormous talent and great ideas for documentaries in Latin America," said Yves Jeanneau, a French film producer who, with the help of Argentine partner INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), launched the event last year. Latin Side of the Doc is the latest iteration, along with Asian Side of the Doc (also in its second year), of Sunny Side of the Doc, which Jeanneau created twenty-three years ago in La Rochelle, France.

In recent years, Sunny Side of the Doc has attracted over two thousand participants from more than fifty countries and has begun to feature a panel on foundation support for documentaries. Indeed, some corporate foundations in Europe are supporting documentaries that explore themes, like the environment, that align with the parent corporation's interests, while others are becoming more aware of the power of documentaries to educate the public about specific issue areas.

"The challenge for documentary filmmakers in the developing world is the lack of financing,” Jeanneau explained during a break in the conference as we strolled along the canal in the city's recently revived Puerto Madera section. "But filmmakers need exposure to other aspects of the business, too."

Sunny Side of the Doc, and its spinoffs, Latin Side and Asian Side, provide training on such practical aspects of filmmaking as contracts and archival rights, as well as workshops on new media and its applications for documentaries. An all-day session at this year's Latin Side event focused on Web-based documentaries and was aimed primarily at younger filmmakers.

"I'm a bridge builder," said Jeanneau. "I tell the filmmakers who come to these events, 'Don't just look for the pre-sales to broadcasters!' The real payoff is to find European and Latin American producers you can partner with and to find the broadcasters and distributors you can work with in the long term. Latin American filmmakers can find collaborators at this meeting -- both from Europe and from Latin America -- that they can work with. Stronger production companies are what's needed. That's what I hope will come out of this week."

According to Marcelo Cespedes, who heads up "DOC BsAs," the annual documentary film festival in Buenos Aires, and is local manager of Latin Side of the Doc, more than four hundred proposals were received from filmmakers this year. Twelve films from Latin America and twelve from Europe (with a Latin American theme) were selected for the "pitch" sessions -- fifteen-minute presentations before an audience of decision-makers, who weigh in with questions and comments, indicating their interest, or lack thereof. While it's nerve-racking for the filmmakers, it's a way to get their projects noticed, and they can potentially walk away with commitments in hand -- although, as Jeanneau says, that's rare.

In addition to those selected to pitch, a hundred and fifty applicants were selected for one-on-one meetings with various decision-makers. In all, about three hundred people attended this year's event, double the number who attended the inaugural event last year.

Latin Side of the Doc unfolded like a good documentary, with fascinating characters and lots of drama. Did any of the projects get funded? Were any new partnerships forged? I'll let you know in a followup post over the weekend.

-- Kathryn Pyle

A 'Flip' Chat With...Lesley Chilcott, Producer, 'Waiting for Superman'

(This is the eleventh in our series of conversations with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can check out other videos in the series here, including our chat with Kate Robinson, producer of "Saving Philanthropy," which is scheduled for release in the spring of 2011.)

With more and more documentary films finding an audience among the general public, a growing number of funders and nonprofit leaders have begun to ask whether film can be used to raise real money for their causes. According to the panelists at a Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising panel discussion ("Film it. Fundraise. Repeat") I attended earlier this week, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.

Part of the center's Philanthropy 3.0 speaker series, the event featured Lesley Chilcott, producer of the new ed reform documentary Waiting for 'Superman'; Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, executive director of Witness.org, a nonprofit that uses video to expose human rights abuses; Asi Burak, co-president of Games for Change and co-founder of the ImpactGames; Chris Kazi Rolle, co-founder and creator of The Hip Hop Project, which highlights Rolle's journey from poverty to entertainment success; and Kaoru Tozaki Wang, a first-time filmmaker.

Led by moderator Marcia Stepanek, founding editor-in-chief of ContributeMedia, the panelists described how social issue documentaries can be used not only to highlight an issue, but to start a movement. Indeed, in the case of Waiting for 'Superman', that's exactly what Chilcott and director David Guggenheim have done.

During her presentation, Chilcott explained that before the film was released, the "Superman" team reached out to communities across the country, encouraging them to mount "pledge to see the film" campaigns. The team also partnered with DonorsChoose.org, which pledged $5 toward a classroom project of a donor's choice for the first 50,000 people who took the pledge; First Book, which promised to donate 250,000 new books to schools and programs in low-income communities; and NewSchools Venture Fund, which committed to invest $5 million in innovative education organizations if 150,000 people took the pledge. To date, more than 261,000 people have pledged to see the film.

After the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Chilcott about the film and the state of education reform in the United States. During our chat, Chilcott also explained why she believes the film has struck a nerve and what she and the "Superman" team are doing to keep the issue of education reform in the spotlight.

 

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.)

(Running time: 4 minutes, 12 seconds)

What do you think? Have you seen Waiting for "Superman"? Did you like it? Hate it? Are you optimistic about future of public education in the U.S.? And if you're a filmmaker, what advice would you give others interested in producing social issue documentaries?

-- Regina Mahone

Muslim Voices of Philadelphia

(Kathryn Pyle is a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about civil rights documentaries.)

"Muslim Americans feel so muted today, drowned out by the hysteria in the mainstream media," lamented Moein Khawaja, director of the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), at a special iftar, or meal breaking the Ramadan fast, last week. "We're only about six million people in the U.S., and for the past nine years we've been on the defensive. We have to be proactive and produce our own media that's more representative of our experiences: media that's more positive; that shows the multitude of Islamic voices."

Just such an opportunity has been created in Philadelphia, thanks in part to a planning grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and an intern secured through the Samuel S. Fels Fund's annual summer program linking graduate students with community groups. Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, launched at that recent iftar, is a collaborative media project hosted by the Scribe Video Center, a nonprofit organization that works with individuals and groups without know-how or means to tell their stories in video, radio, and new media. The project will produce ten videos over the next two years, with participants from local Muslim organizations shaping the aims and content, learning the necessary skills, and actually making the films.

While the Muslim Voices project may be its newest activity, Scribe boasts a 27-year history of building media capacity among minority communities. The center offers a roster of classes, open to everyone, and also works with selected projects proposed and implemented by community groups. In the latter case, Scribe provides the training, equipment, and advisors needed to shepherd the projects from idea to screening. Hundreds of videos have been created over the years, recording a variety of places and programs and, just as importantly, capturing the memories and spirit embodied in neighborhoods, buildings, and public spaces: from an animation-enhanced hip-hop music-ed short about a bicycle shop in West Philadelphia that teaches local kids how to repair bikes to more traditional documentaries about a cemetery, a community garden, a swim club, and everything in between. The aim is to help organizations produce media for their own archives, educational purposes, and/or for broadcast via public television, community cable channels, and public screenings at traditional venues and outdoor events.

"Muslims have been part of several video programs in recent years," said Scribe director Louis Massiah, who is co-leading the project with Haverford College professor Maris Gillette. "One example is the New Africa Center, represented at the iftar; they participated in Scribe's Precious Places program a few years ago. Precious Places celebrates Philadelphia's neighborhoods, told by the very same residents who live there. Through Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, we're hoping for a collection of films that represent the diversity of that particular community."

Located in the heart of West Philadelphia, the New Africa Center/Muslim American Museum & Archive is the creation of the Islamic Cultural Preservation and Information Council, a coalition of scholars, educators, artists, and families that organizes exhibits about African-American Muslims and supports the surrounding Muslim community with seminars, educational programs, and family activities. The center has also worked with the Philadelphia school district and the Pennsylvania Department of Education to conduct teacher training and classroom presentations on Islamic culture. The video produced through Precious Places -- filming of which is captured in the photo above -- was aired on local public television station WHYY in 2008 and has been used in ongoing educational programs.

Muslim Voices got off the ground thanks in part to research by Ayesha Butt, a Fels intern and Ph.D. candidate in religion. Several online databases helped her locate contemporary Islamic centers, mosques, businesses, and restaurants, and the search continued by word of mouth once key contacts were made. Ayesha's research revealed that by the late 1800s, Muslim immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean had settled in the region. Successive waves of newcomers mirrored the immigration patterns of other groups, with the area's Muslim population expanding significantly following World War II and again over the past two decades. "There are now fifty-one Islamic centers here," she told the audience at the Scribe event, which attracted about seventy people representing various groups; the iftar was part of the outreach for the project.

The project, still being defined in collaboration with the community, will connect archival research, ethnography, oral history, and digital media. Each individual film project will be supported by a filmmaker advisor and scholar, said Gillette, an anthropologist and expert on China whose early work with the Hui, a Muslim population in northwest China, stimulated her interest in Muslim culture. "I think most of the groups want to document the history of their organizations -- mosques, advocacy groups, and social networks. People from some of the African-American masjids (mosques) also indicated an interest in exploring how Islam figured in their struggles for civil rights, so I think that could be a theme. We're looking forward to working with the organizations who've already expressed interest and hoping to reach out to even more groups over the coming months."

The project received a planning and development grant from the Pew Center's Heritage Philadelphia Program. According to program director Bill Adair, "The proposal review panel that selected Muslim Voices for funding was intrigued by the potential to bring together the various communities within the community bound by the Islamic faith." The panel met last spring, before the current provocations directed against Muslims, but, as noted by Adair, with the understanding that Muslims have faced increasing discrimination since 9/11. "We're all tremendously excited about this initiative," he said. "There's no better illustration of our priority: projects that unveil hidden histories that, in their telling, inform the present."

In a recent post for PhilanTopic, Michael Seltzer described Lower Manhattan as a "neighborhood of conscience" and located the Islamic community center and mosque proposed for the neighborhood in the context of nearby groups that work to recognize and promote dialogue and a "culture of human rights." Muslim Voices of Philadelphia promises to extend that neighborhood to the City of Brotherly Love.

Do you know of similar projects in other parts of the country that share this vision of a collective humanity? If so, we'd love to hear about them in the comments section below.

(Photo credit: Scribe Video Center)

-- Kathryn Smith Pyle

Back to School With Superman and Friends

(Laura Cronin is director of the New York City-based Toshiba America Foundation. In her last post, she chatted with Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff.)

Later this month, Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim will release a new documentary, Waiting for Superman, that aims to bring the contentious education reform debate to a broader public.

The filmmaker and his foundation backers are also using social media to invite viewers into the discussion. The Web site created for the film's launch features a clever tie-in with DonorsChoose, an online giving platform, that enables people who pledge to see the film to direct $5 to a classroom project of their choice. The site also calls viewers to action by urging them to write to their governor, state representatives, etc.

But while you're waiting for Superman to come to a theater near you (it opens September 24), don't overlook another foundation-funded peek behind the classroom door: Testing Teachers, a new radio documentary from American Radio Works that aired last week and is now available online as a podcast, radio stream, or in transcript form.

For me, the most compelling segment of the hour-long documentary, which was funded by the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation, is the description of reform efforts in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that've been spearheaded by the locally based Benwood and Public Education foundations. Among other things, the segment introduces us to Joe Curtis, a master teacher at a local elementary school, and gives us a glimpse of the many factors that get in the way of good teaching.

Kids all over the country will be heading back to school next week. Many of those schools and the teachers in them are excellent; too many others are not. We owe it to our kids to do better. So this Labor Day weekend, take an hour to listen to Testing Teachers and hear what some foundations and education reformers have learned about good teaching and what they are doing to boost teacher effectiveness, in their districts and across the nation.

-- Laura Cronin

A 'Flip' Chat With...Terry Lawler, Executive Director, New York Women in Film & Television

(This is the fifth in our series of "Flip" chats with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can find others here, including the previous one with Ben Esner of the Brooklyn Community Foundation.)

Last week a sold-out audience filled the Foundation Center's training annex to hear Terry Lawler, executive director of New York Women in Film & Television, lead a panel discussion on the subject of raising money for independent films. Lawler was joined on the panel by Randall Dottin, film director and faculty at New York Film Academy; Matthew Seig, media specialist with the New York Foundation for the Arts; and Angela Tucker, director of production at Arts Engine. (For more information about the event, check out my colleague Susan Shiroma's post at the Philanthropy Front and Center – New York blog.)

Before the event, I had a chance to chat with Lawler about the state of independent filmmaking in the U.S. Because my knowledge of independent film is limited to old home movies shot by my grandfather, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how independent filmmakers today are working to link their messages with the programs and interests of various foundations. Lawler also pointed out that social media increasingly is both a proving ground and fundraising tool for independent filmmakers. And she ended our chat by reminding PND readers that independent film, as a career, is no picnic. As Lawler puts it, you've got to be someone who can take "no" for an answer and yet not take "no" for an answer!

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(Total running time: 5 minutes, 9 seconds)

-- Emily Robbins