The Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, in collaboration with several other organizations, has just released a powerful video sharing the stories of several families whose lives have been changed by public housing support.
The piece, Along the Way Home, aims to bring public attention to the housing needs of lower income people and highlight successful models for addressing those needs. It was produced by Maine-based Pull-Start Pictures, and can be seen on YouTube or on its website.
Please help spread the word about this video and its important message.
I had a great time with the Under Water's Mercy team watching trailers from 20 great projects - narrative and documentary - that were part of the IFP Independent Filmmaker Labs this summer.
The docs were especially strong, including Dear Mandela, about three young slum dwellers who refuse to be evicted from their homes in one of Durban's sprawling shantytowns; 25 to Life, about an HIV-positive man who seeks redemption from the women of his promiscuous past; and Smokin' Fish, about a young Tlingit Indian man who makes a pilgrimage to rural Alaska to spend a summer living off the land.
The show was part of IFP Film Week, and was put on outdoors along the Hudson River in New York City by Rooftop Films. I had barely heard of Rooftop Films before this, and now I'm a huge fan! "Underground Movies Outdoors"... we hope we'll have a chance to screen Under Water's Mercy this way when we're done.
It has been a productive and fun week at IFP's Independent Film Week - a real powerhouse of an event.
I just got home from seeing Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, which follows one family among the 130 million migrant factory workers in China. It's a powerful film which manages to capture something of the broad sweep of humanity and the intimate struggles of this one family. It did seem a bit contrived at times, but I recognize the challenges of filming in China and certainly forgive the filmmakers for doing what they did to knit together their story.
The film was showing at the Brattle Theatre as the last of this season's Docyard screenings, which help build our Boston documentary filmmaking community. After the screening, the filmmaker skyped in for a Q&A (pictured above).
It was great reconnecting with old friends, including Jesse Shapins, a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Design who is also an urban media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur. When I worked at Harvard's Film Study Center last year, we helped Jesse and his classmate Olga Touloumi curate A Media Archaeology of Boston - which pulled together media representations of the Boston area landscape over the last 100+ years. Thanks to all their effort, it was a great show - ranging from stuttery 1901 movies of Boston streetcars, to cheesy 1980s fiction films, to a black-and-white documentary on the Boston Marathon and a promotional video featuring the mayor of Somerville jogging through the city streets.
Jesse has just started co-teaching A Media Archaeology of Place, which looks to be a fascinating course "exploring different modes of representing place." I'm looking forward to seeing the final output of this class, which will be accessible to the public on a map-based website.
I'm very excited to be heading to New York for Independent Film Week (what they used to call the IFP Market) with Under Water's Mercy, a film I'm co-producing and editing with Sharon Linezo Hong and Monique Verdin. This will be our first public exposure for the film.