Interacting with thoughtful talented filmmakers and organizers is the best part of my job, and that job is made all the better when I get the chance to work with these folks on multiple projects. That’s where I find myself at this moment, engaged in another opportunity to support the work of filmmaker Dan Habib. My colleague, Molly Murphy, and I facilitated a strategy summit for Dan’s first film, Including Samuel, that resulted in the I Am Norm campaign and other collaborations between the film and educators, disability rights organizations,…
As Thoughts of George Rise Up: Judith Helfand on Long-Time Mentor George Stoney Original Post can be found at PBS.org’s POV Films Blog Page Soon after the news of George Stoney’s passing was made public, POV asked me to write a few words about him and our work together on The Uprising of ’34, which was broadcast on POV in June 1995 — a fact we were both so very proud of. Life’s divine symmetry had me start writing this on the way to a complicated shoot that I was…
Lucy Cooke, a PUMA Creative Winner and good friend of Working Films has an upcoming National Geographic series titled “Freaks and Creeps” set to air on Tuesday July 17 at 10pm ET. Read her blog post below to learn more about the production and her adventures: Tasmania is like a time machine. Its primeval forests team with living fossils that have followed a different evolutionary branch to most mammals. So for freak lovers like me it’s like hitting the jackpot. My number one quarry is the echidna – an ancient…
On June 19th I had the pleasure of moderating our Story Leads to Action panel with my colleague Judith Helfand, co-founder of both Working Films and Chicken and Egg Pictures. This year’s panel featured the award winning documentary Brooklyn Castle. After watching several clips from the film where we saw the championship chess team and their teachers in action and learned about how budget cuts affected the after school program at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn, we launched into a strategic conversation about how the film can continue to be leveraged…
After starting in festivals in Europe and the US, Our School finally had its premiere in Romania – a homecoming of sorts for the film and an event that we have been anticipating for almost six years. We shot in a small town in Transylvania, a very real place in Northern Romania. Our intention was to begin to understand, and hopefully improve, race relations between majority Romanians and the Roma ethnic minority by showing under a magnifying glass the story of three spirited Roma children involved in a school integration…
This edition of the Good Pitch takes place at Silverdocs, near Washington DC. It brings together inspiring social-purpose film projects and a group of expert participants from charities, foundations, brands and media to form powerful alliances around groundbreaking films. THE LINEUP We are delighted to announce that we have selected the lineup for the Good Pitch @ Silverdocs. The 8 filmmakers are Victor Buhler (A Whole Lott More), Macky Alston (The Truth Will Set You Free), Jon Shenk (Higher Ground), Angad Bhalla (The House That Herman Built), Dara Kell &…
Join us for an inspiring weekend workshop designed to jump start campaigns for a limited number of excellent social issue documentaries on the 23rd-25th, July 2010. Outcomes include the identification of a range of potential outreach partners – including leading non-profits and social entrepreneurs as well as corporate and branding agencies. The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation and Working Films designed this workshop to create effective and strategic outreach campaigns and non-traditional distribution plans – reaching the audiences who need these films. Working Films’ co-founders Robert West and Judith Helfand and…
As Thursday is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re thinking about our impact in the sustainability work that we do, and the change that media projects like No Impact Man can spark. How do filmmakers create an audience engagement campaign that is unique, yet has ties to a movement that already exists? Gillian Caldwell, Campaign Director of 1Sky, puts it simply when speaking about their partnership with No Impact Man, “It’s important that the relationship be reciprocal.” Working Films and The Fledgling Fund are excited to bring you the…
I just came across this great article about the Transition movement. This movement isn’t about sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves because of climate change and peak oil. It’s about doing something, or as the article says, “Transition wants people to envision and create models for that future — and find much to be cheerful about.” I was excited to see the Transition movement getting the attention it deserves, especially because Working Films just recently worked with Transition US to put together a special offer for their supporters who want…
What do indigenous communities in the Amazon and a rather prosperous coastal town in North Carolina have in common? Not much you might think, and generally you would be right. There are certainly many differences, but it turns out that folks concerned about the environment and public health in Wilmington, North Carolina have much to learn from communities struggling for environmental justice in the Ecuadorian villages featured in the film Crude. A screening of Crude at the Cucalorus Film Festival in Working Films’ hometown of Wilmington, N.C. gave me the…
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