Filmmakers Steer Clear of Big Easy Clichés

Five years ago, the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States struck southern Louisiana, forever altering the face of America’s most unique and freewheeling city, New Orleans. While the news media revisits the Crescent City to find out what has changed and what hasn’t, a team of filmmakers working with ITVS is documenting the real story of the resurrection of a metropolis with a long history of coming back from the dead with inimitable style.

Their documentary-in-progress Getting Back to Abnormal by former New Orleans residents, Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker, Peter Odabashian, and Paul Stekler, explores the state of New Orleans politics and culture five years after Hurricane Katrina.

Set against the backdrop of the 2009-2010 local political season, the election of the first white mayor in a generation, and the triumph of the city’s erstwhile worst NFL team, the Saints, Getting Back to Abnormal will frame its story via the city’s complicated and ever-present issues of race.

The film was one of several to receive Open Call funding from ITVS in the most recent round. At the producers’ orientation last month, filmmakers Andrew Kolker and Paul Stekler spoke about what New Orleans means to them and why it was important to get the story right.

Tags: hurricane, ITVS, Katrina, New Orleans, nola, PBS, public television

Filmmaking Couple Shed Light on Speaking in Tongues

Filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider — Photo by Najib Joe Hakim

The award-winning ITVS film, Speaking in Tongues, tells the stories of four diverse kids becoming bilingual in the public school system. Filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and her husband Ken Schneider, will present the documentary at a special screening and panel discussion hosted at KQED in San Francisco — Thursday, September 2^nd (6:30 to 8:30 PM).

Our idea in making Speaking in Tongues was to showcase a world where communication barriers are being addressed. An African-American boy from public housing learns to read, write, and speak Mandarin. A Mexican-American boy, whose parents are not literate in any language, develops professional-level Spanish while mastering English. A Chinese-American girl regains her grandparents’ mother tongue, a language her parents lost through assimilation. A Caucasian teen travels to Beijing to stay with a Mandarin speaking host family. Their stories reveal the promise of a multilingual America.

We’ve witnessed this transformation in our own home. Our sons are in their fourth and eighth year in a public school Chinese immersion program. They cause a stir when they order in accent-less Chinese at local restaurants. But they also have translated for a confused Chinese speaker lost at the doctor, visited shut-in Chinese speaking elders, felt at home in a traditional Chinese home, and very important for us, helped us understand our film footage. When spoken to by a native speaker, they don’t pause to translate; they think in Chinese, having learned it like a baby, by hearing it spoken around them. Their experience prompts the telling of these small stories that in turn provoke one of the most compelling questions of our day: what do we as a nation need to know in the 21st century?

Photo by Andy Black

We truly believe that the promise of a multilingual America can be fulfilled. Support for multilingualism comes from a unique cross section of America. Community leaders, teachers, policymakers, and advocates from organizations at the forefront of multilingual education, in addition to parents of bilingual children, bring a range of perspectives that when brought together, generally makes for a lively and meaningful discussion. It is a honor to have the opportunity to share this film with communities nationwide.

To find out where you can see it, how to bring the discussion to your community, or to learn more about the benefits of multilingualism, please join our mailing list or Facebook group, read our blog, and check out the resources on our website.

You can also join us for an online conversation on September 13th at the Movie Night Salon, on Firedoglake.com from 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm ET/ 5:00pm – 6:30 pm PT.

Tags: bilingual, chinese, education, mandarin, multilingual, school, Spanish, students

Behind the Scenes: Kunstler’s Daughters Reflect

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe aired last night on P.O.V. on PBS. But the conversation continued online well into the next day. Filmmakers Emily and Sarah Kunstler both logged on for a live chat with their audience immediately after the broadcast.

With America’s best known civil rights lawyer still fresh in everyone’s thoughts, the daughters fielded a wide range of questions from viewers. One participant asked how their father would have felt about the internet as a platform for activism. Both Emily and Sarah were convinced he would have been obsessed with following his press mentions through “Google alerts.” Read the full transcript from last night’s chat here.

Plus, watch exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from the film. Here you will see how Michelangelo’s David, an inspiration to a young William Kunstler, came to life through animation.

Tags: attica, chicago seven, civil rights, disturbing the universe, lawyer, P.O.V., PBS, william kunstler, wounded knee

This Week on Global Voices: The China-North Korea Border in Perspective

Last week, a North Korean border guard shot four Chinese citizens, killing three, near Dandong along the tense border between the two countries. This comes just over a year since Current TV reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested by North Korean guards at a different stretch of border in March of 2009 and sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp (former President Bill Clinton negotiated their release in August of the same year).

While China and North Korea historically have been politically and economically friendly, the increasingly erratic and provocative behavior of North Korea’s leadership has strained relations in recent years. That is precisely the story Chinese-born filmmaker Liang Zhao set out to tell when he went back to his childhood home in Dandong, situated on the border with North Korea. In his film Return to the Border, which airs beginning this Sunday on Global Voices (PBS WORLD), Liang goes back to his hometown only to find it vastly changed from his childhood decades ago. In the intervening years, North Korean President Kim Il-sung died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il. China abandoned its isolationism and began trading with the West, further alienating its fellow communists in North Korea. North Koreans suffered a brutal famine, in which as many as 2 million died.

Liang talks Dandong residents and former North Korean citizens, and tours the border, even covertly entering North Korea to bear witness to the strange militarism of its culture and fearful behavior by its citizens. Border guards appear, and quietly ask for cigarettes and food. The film explores how borders are purely man-made barriers, and how common humanity transcends them on a daily basis.

Tune in to watch Return to the Border — premiering Sunday on Global Voices (check local listings)— for a glimpse into this controversial line on the map for context into the conflicts there that are making the news today.

Tags: Border, China, Kim Jong Il, North Korea, South Korea

Caviar with the Rat Brothers

Legendary fisherman Pa Drnda (aka the “King of Caviar”) can only watch in horror as his two sons drive the family business into the water. The Caviar Connection documents the epic pursuit of Ivan and Dragon (aka “The Rat Brothers”) as they troll along the Danube River in search for the one that got away. The elusive fish: a fat sturgeon whose eggs are worth big money or at least enough to abandon their small Serbian village for greener pastures.

The Caviar Connection airs Sunday, June 6 on Global Voices on PBS World. Check here for local listings.

You can also watch online at PBS.org.

Tags: caviar, documentary, fishing, Serbia

Youth Activists Step Up in New Orleans

Part of the miraculous story of the neighborhood called Versailles in New Orleans rising from the floodwaters to rebuild itself and sustain its citizens after Hurricane Katrina was the unprecedented leadership role that the younger generation took.

Traditionally, the Vietnamese culture in both Vietnam and in this community’s adopted home in New Orleans reserved moral, ethical, and political leadership to the older generations. In the wake of Katrina, and now in the midst of a cataclysmic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the younger generation is proving to be an indispensible link between the English-speaking establishment and the older generations of Vietnamese immigrants who, because of a language and cultural divide, cannot effectively speak for themselves.

In this web-exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, watch how the youth in Versailles stepped into a void and organized their community to rebuild its demolished infrastructure, and then fight off a cynical political ploy to locate a toxic waste dump next to their neighborhood:

Watch A Village Called Versailles tonight on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings).

Tags: Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, oil spill, Vietnamese, youth

New Orleans Vietnamese Take Another Blow

The scale of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is nearly impossible to comprehend. Because the spill is an ongoing catastrophe, the scope of the devastation to local communities cannot even begin to be tabulated.

A third to half of the commercial fishers in the spill area are Vietnamese. Again, the Vietnamese community in New Orleans is taking a huge proportion of the impact this disaster.

While British Petroleum has pledged to compensate fishers who are losing their livelihoods because of the spill, the choices they offer aren’t very appetizing: fishers may file a claim for up to $5,000 for losses related to the spill, or sign up for training to do oil clean-up work. In each case, they sign waivers agreeing to never hold the company liable for future losses or injury. The problem is, all of the paperwork — and all of the training — is in English, and most of the fishers cannot read or speak English, let alone understand legal fine print. BP has not provided any Vietnamese-speaking claims personnel to connect with this demographic.

Father Vien Nguyen, who rallied his community against a toxic landfill in the months after Katrina, is fighting back against BP’s seemingly cavalier approach to this devastated local economy and the Vietnamese people who keep it alive.

Watch A Village Called Versailles featuring Father Vien’s battle against the landfill in 2005, on Independent Lens Tuesday, May 25th on PBS (Check local listings).

And watch Father Vien’s update on what’s happening in Versailles since the oil disaster began:

Tags: bp, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, oil spill, Vietnamese

Father Vien — New Orleans’ Community Champion

Father Vien Nguyen, a Catholic priest and progressive social activist in the Vietnamese community of New Orleans recently received the Community Champion Award from the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations (AAPCHO). Father Vien is prominently featured in the Independent Lens documentary A Village Called Versailles, airing next Tuesday, May 25th on PBS (check local listings). AAPCHO Membership Relations Associate Grace-Sonia Melanio gives us a recap of the awards ceremony.

Father Vien Nguyen accepting the AAPCHO Community Champion Award

In February, the organization I work for, the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations (AAPCHO), at their fundraising awards gala, showed excerpts from A Village Called Versailles, and presented Father Vien Nguyen with AAPCHO’s Community Champion Award.

For those of you who are not already familiar with AAPCHO’s work, AAPCHO is a national organization representing community health centers dedicated to promoting advocacy, collaboration, and leadership that advances the health status of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders. So when my organization began having conversations about honoring a community champion, we wanted to recognize Father Vien’s work towards re-establishing primary health care services in New Orleans East post-Katrina. As chronicled in A Village Called Versailles, Father Vien’s leadership helped galvanize Vietnamese Americans in Louisiana to rebuild their region, and fight a toxic landfill that threatened the well-being and health of their community.

When ITVS learned that AAPCHO planned to honor Father Vien, they graciously loaned us a copy of the film to show at our awards ceremony. While Father Vien’s accomplishments were read by our emcee, film and television actress Tamlyn Tomita, the audience was visibly moved, as footage from the documentary was simultaneously projected on two large screens. The film punctuated the remarkable battle Father Vien and the Vietnamese American community of Versailles had fought and won to reclaim and protect their home.

Watch the trailer for A Village Called Versailes >>

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Tags: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, oil spill, Vietnamese

Kashmir: An Explosive Eden

The ever-embattled territory of Kashmir in the Himalayas is again in the news, as representatives from Amnesty International arrived there this week to investigate reports of human rights abuses lodged against both Indian and Pakistani combatants. In the 21 years since the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule in the region erupted, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been killed.

Coincidentally, Project Kashmir premieres on Independent Lens tonight (check local listings). In this beautiful and cogent new show, producers Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi sneak their cameras into Kashmir to observe the secretive and anxious lives of the region’s inhabitants, and to look for clues to what started the conflict — which could become nuclear at any time — and how religious and national allegiances can seemingly immunize people to their own most human instincts for survival.

The filmmakers’ journey is especially moving when they find themselves pulled in separate directions by their own divergent ethnicities. Patel — an Indian American Hindu, and Kheshgi — a Pakistani American Muslim find their own friendship eroding as they begin personally identifying with opposite sides of the struggle.

Catch the film tonight on PBS, and watch this exclusive behind-the-scenes footage for a glimpse into this beautiful and deadly region >>

Tags: hindu, India, kashmir, Muslim, Pakistan

Psycho No More: Breaking the Stigma of Mental Illness

When you call someone “crazy” or “psycho,” consider this: about one in six adults and one in 10 children have a diagnosable mental illness. The stigma that clings to mental illness (and the casual use of cruel language) makes coping especially difficult for those who suffer, and can also deter them from seeking help. We’re mentioning this to mark the middle of National Mental Illness Awareness Month, and to highlight a couple of programs that address the challenges and victories for individuals and communities who have struggled with mental illness and stigma.

Mental illness is singular in a tragic way — the medical community has historically (and incorrectly) assigned blame for certain illness on its sufferers and their families — for example, autism was often blamed on cold or emotionally distant mothers from the 1950s through the 1970s (see Refrigerator Mothers, P.O.V., 2002). Such institutional failures have served to legitimize stigma in deadly ways.

That brings us to When Medicine Got it Wrong, a new co-production of ITVS and KQED/San Francisco, distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA), airing on select public television stations this month (check local listings). It is a inspirational film about a brave group of parents who rejected the prevailing medical opinion in the early 1970s that their children’s schizophrenia was the result of bad parenting. They launched a grassroots campaign that radically changed the way society cares for and medical science researches and treats mental illness of all kinds.

Stigma and discrimination almost always result from a lack of good information and too many false presumptions. Take a minute this month to reconsider your assumptions about the mentally ill.

Watch a trailer for When Medicine Got It Wrong >>

Tags: medicine, mental health, mental illness, schizophrenia