In partnership with KQED, The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Youth ALIVE!, the Urban Peace Movement, and a host of other youth organizations represented, the film showed to a standing room only packed house in two theaters.

Youth were at the center of the discussion and made up the majority of the audience.  The panel included Ameena Matthews and Eddie Bocanegra, Violence Interrupters featured in the film.

Community Cinema and The Museum of Tolerance, in association with The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum, will be presenting a special screening of Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock Wednesday, February 1 in Los Angeles.

The film will be followed by a discussion with Sharon La Cruise (filmmaker), Terrence Roberts, Ph.D. (one of the Little Rock Nine), and Larry Earl (Executive Director of The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum).

This free event will take place at The Museum of Tolerance at 7:00pm (9786 West Pico Blvd.). There is no charge for this screening, but pre-registration is required. Click here to reserve your tickets online. Free underground parking is provided.

Set to premiere on Independent Lens this Thursday, Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock tells the story of her life and public support of nine black students who registered to attend the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which culminated in a constitutional crisis — pitting a president against a governor and a community against itself. Unconventional, revolutionary, and egotistical, Daisy Bates reaped the rewards of instant fame, but paid dearly for it.

An online interactive screening of the film will be presented out of Central High School in Little Rock on Friday, February 3.

The organization has supported a slate of documentaries that shine a unique light on the history of African American activism. Several of the films will air this month on Independent Lens. 

February is Black History Month.  It’s an important time for public media, because the heritage months — as artificial as they seem to some, including ITVS-funded filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman, whose film More than A Month tracks his playful yet serious quest to end Black History Month — act as public reminders of our mission to bring underrepresented voices into the mainstream and ensure that the diversity of the nation is reflected on television.

One glance at public television’s offerings reminds us that American history is black history and black history is American history, so intertwined and inseparable are the African-American experience and the life of the United States.

What you’ll find on public television in February are nine new, original programs across PBS series like Frontline, Independent Lens, and Great Performances, alongside encore presentations of landmark programs like Freedom Riders. 

Among the premieres are four ITVS programs that together represent part of what’s special about public television: not just telling stories that should be told and heard, but looking for new and innovative ways to tell them.  And making sure communities can use these stories to engage, face-to-face and online, in ways that celebrate, debate, and most of all connect.

On the innovation front, the mobile app More than a Mapp brings the spirit of More than a Month to mobile devices, providing a fun and interactive (and year-round!) way to learn about Black History through landmarks and historical sites nationwide.  We’re also piloting a new online screening tool — sort of a virtual Community Cinema event, moderated by local public television stations, where people can watch a film together and discuss in real time — with selected Black History month programming through February.

Back in the brick-and-mortar world, Community Cinema is on track to host 200 screenings in January (the biopic Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock) and February (More Than a Month).  And that doesn’t include the selected outreach events to accompany the ITVS-funded The Interrupters,a groundbreaking look at the urban cycle of violence in Chicago and one of the most talked about films in recent history, which airs on Frontline on February 14^th.

We’re also excited about two international programs that shed surprising light on the African-American experience: February’s The Black Power Mix Tape, a retelling of the Black Power Movement through lost footage filmed by Swedish journalists, and the January broadcast of Have You Heard from Johannesburg, a five-part look at the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa.

All in all, it’s an emblematic way for ITVS to start a year filled with programming that goes straight to the heart of public media’s mission: sparking all-American, year-round, year-after-year conversations about who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going, and who we want to be.

Photo by Julie Wyman

Media mavens

My colleague, production coordinator N’Jeri Eaton, is an editing pro and an experienced youth media instructor — so that was a plus. Filmmakers Julie Wyman (Strong!) and Elizabeth Mandel (Pushing the Elephant), who were at the convention with us to present their films, were on hand to co-facilitate the sessions. We were also fortunate to have Houston media producer Linda Gibbs and her advanced media production students from Hightower Academy come help. Add to the mix local independent filmmaker Michelle Mower and Houston PBS’s Julie Coan and we were in pretty good shape.

As a result of these workshops, these girls are going back to their communities with the know-how to tell their stories and share them, and for some, with a growing interest in media making as a career!

Here are some of the participants, talking about the experience in their own words:

I wish I had been cool enough to be a Girl Scout way back when.

Join ITVS’s Women and Girls Lead Campaign on Facebook

We had an incredible turnout at the HoustonPBS Community Cinema screening of Deaf Jam with 175 people from all ages and ethnicities. A number of deaf students from Teague Middle School came with their teachers. An organization called Communication Axess Ability Group provided two interpreters for free so everyone could enjoy the evening.

After the film we had a local ASL poet, Jonathan Leach, perform as well as two spoken word poets, Robyn Adams and Marcell Murphy. They were incredible.

During the panel discussion Jonathan communicated what it would have meant for him if he had a film like Deaf Jam when he was younger — it would have made his high school years a whole lot better.

A gentleman with a local spoken word group for kids called, Meta Four Houston, stood up and said, “I never heard of ASL poetry before tonight. It’s beautiful. How can we get deaf kids involved with us?” At which point we directed him to the Teague kids and their teachers in the audience.

Marcell Murphy stood up and said, “It’s great that we’re hooking the kids up, but what about the adults? They have things they want to express, too.  How can we get ASL Adults involved with our poetry slams?”

It was just amazing. Two communities that probably would have never had a chance to come together, came together because of that film and the opportunity presented by Community Cinema. It was a beautiful thing. I wish you all could have been there to experience it.

It was one of those nights when it becomes crystal clear that public media can and does make a difference in people’s lives. The deaf people in the audience left inspired and the hearing audience left enlightened (and probably inspired, too).

Many thanks for this incredible opportunity. I’m honored to be part of Community Cinema.

All the best,

Julie

Julie Coan
Director of Communications & External Relations
HoustonPBS
LeRoy and Lucile Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting

Find Community Cinema events in your area on our website

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephan Covey’s fourth habit encourages, “Think Win-Win.” As Covey points out – and as we’ve discovered in our community engagement work with public media at NCME  – Win-Win is a frame of mind that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions that are mutually beneficial and satisfying. In other words, solutions that grow a bigger pie. That’s what effective collaboration is about, too. And collaborating is a key behavior among those with an engagement ethos.

There’s no better example than our new “win-win” partnership with ITVS and its highly successful Community Cinema program. In just six years, Community Cinema has expanded to more than 100 communities across the country, producing more than 2,500 screenings and welcoming over 150,000 participants. Its commitment to bringing communities and local organizations together through the featured documentaries aligns perfectly with NCME’s CPB-funded mission to support public media in working collaboratively with their communities to discover, understand, and address community concerns.

Starting this fall, NCME will collaborate with ITVS as a National Impact Partner for Community Cinema. As part of this “win-win” arrangement, NCME will bring to Community Cinema our community engagement expertise learned from station experience. We’ll focus on developing and delivering impact strategies and collaborating with stations to capture and convey stories that demonstrate the program’s overall performance and impact in communities. Our Director of Television and Digital Media Engagement, Jennifer MacArthur, will host monthly webinars and coach stations on strategies that can leverage the films for local impact.

This partnership is an opportunity to deepen our relationship with public television stations, to better understand their needs, and to create efficient, effective strategies of engagement around the great content that is Community Cinema. By integrating Community Cinema into other station-led engagement work, we can help stations grow the pie bigger locally – and that’s a win-win-win for stronger stations, stronger stories, and stronger communities.  Plus, we get to work with Dennis Palmieri and the dynamic team at ITVS – and that’s always rewarding.

Here’s to a great new season of Community Cinema and its impact in communities.

Indiewire: Two Spirits Receives the Audience Award from PBS-Independent Lens
Lynda Nibley’s documentary Two Spirits has received the PBS-Independent Lens Audience Award, recognizing its status as the highest-rated film of the 2010-11 season by the measures of online voting and other forms of audience support.

Pop Matters: Cuba, An African Odyssey
El-Tahri’s fascinating documentary, produced in 2007 with the French-German television network Arte and premiering in two parts on ITVS’ Global Voices this month, traces the complicated history of Cuban efforts to help African independence movements during the Cold War.

Institute For the Future blog: Karim Ahmad introduces FUTURESTATES
Karim discussed his goal of tackling complex and often controversial topics often not seen on public TV, as well as the potential to engage new audiences across a wider range of platforms.

About.com: The Transmedia Approach to Documentary Development and Marketing
The Garbage Dreams multiplatform brand is the film’s issue. More specifically, the brand is the issue of waste disposal, recycling and how all that effects human life on Earth. That’s what the film’s about. That’s what the game’s about. That’s what the discussion is about. The issue is the brand. Branding by issue is a different way of conceiving and developing a movie’s marketing strategy, but it certainly seems appropriate for documentaries.

NCME Blog – News Hub: Building Inclusive Communities
One such project is the Independent Lens documentary Welcome to Shelbyville and the accompanying Shelbyville Multimedia engagement campaign, produced by Active Voice. Following the May 2011 PBS broadcast, Welcoming Gathering potlucks and Community Cinema screenings, held nationwide, ITVS partnered with the U.S. State Department to host a special screening of Welcome to Shelbyville for policy makers, advocates, service providers, and government officials working on refugee resettlement issues.

Visit our pressroom to find additional coverage of ITVS programs.

As we ring in Earth Day celebrations across the country, we wanted to highlight some of the extraordinary films that ITVS had the opportunity to take out to communities through broadcast and on-the-ground engagement. On Thursday, we profiled Dirt! The Movie and filmmaker Eugene Rosow. Today we’re featuring Lisa Merton and her documentary Taking Root.

What’s been happening with your film since 2009?

Since our Independent Lens broadcast and the Community Cinema screenings in 2009, Taking Root has taken on a life of its own. We continually get requests for screenings from around the world.

The film has been shown in over 55 film festivals in 22 countries from Lithuania to Amman, Jordan. Just the other day, I did a Q & A Skype session after a screening of Taking Root that was organized by UN Women in Charlotte, NC. I do this quite often and really enjoy it. Audience members have such good questions. We talk about the origins of the film, what Professor Maathai is doing now and the ways that people can apply the Green Belt Movement philosophy in their communities and take action. And there is always someone who becomes so passionate about the film that they ask if they can set up a screening in their community. And so it goes.

Last summer I had the honor of showing Taking Root in Kenya. It was something that we had hoped to do much earlier on, but despite our intentions it took some time to organize.

It was deeply moving to see so many of the people who are in the film and to hear Kenyan reactions. Many who saw it had lived through the Moi years from 1978-2002 but those under 30 often knew very little about that time.

I think it was most gratifying to show it to these people, because it really opened their eyes to the struggle that had led to the freedoms they now take for granted. They also saw Wangari Maathai with new eyes – they knew that she had “fought the government” but knew very little about the cost to her both professionally and personally – and from seeing the film, a lot of young people felt empowered to carry on the change in their communities.

I visited some of the mothers who had protested at Freedom Corner and all our friends at the Green Belt Movement headquarters who had been so generous with their knowledge and time when we were making the film.

Over the last couple of years we have gotten many requests to translate the film into other languages. Thanks to film festivals, the film has already been translated and subtitled in French, Spanish, Greek, Polish, Italian, Hebrew, Danish, Dutch and Korean. Due to other requests, we have dubbed the film in Haitian Creole and Kiswahili and we are in the process of dubbing it in French, Spanish, Indonesian, and Portuguese. Our plan is to translate the film into 22 languages and dub it in 13. We are doing this so that the film is available to people at the grassroots, people who may not be able to read.

We are very excited about this venture and are deeply grateful that we were able to get the funding to do this. A Nigerian who was at the UN Women screening in Charlotte, NC said it will be so inspiring to all those nations in Africa that are struggling for good governance.

What are you most proud of in terms of the impact you’ve seen your film make on an individual (or a group)?

I am most proud that the film shows a more holistic way of achieving change that benefits all beings and the earth that sustains us; that when the environment is degraded if we take into account all the variables that have created that degradation, we will see that the solutions most often lie with equitable distribution of resources, human rights and good governance.

What will you be doing on earth day this year?

At this point there are no local screenings of Taking Root that I can attend.  We will gather some neighbors and start rebuilding the bridge over our brook that washed out due to heavy rains and ice dams. The bridge made it possible for our neighbors and us to access a huge tract of forest where we can cross country ski and snowshoe and do some winter tracking of otters, coyotes, fox and others.

What do you love most about being a filmmaker?

Thee people that I have the opportunity to meet and where those connections lead me. Each film that we have made has begun because of meeting an individual whose story has touched us. Making films is the lens through which I learn the most about the world and myself. I hope that our films inspire people to look at themselves and the world in a new light as well.

Learn about how you can get involved on the filmmaker’s website and visit ITVS’ Community Classroom to download educator resources and watch film modules adapted from Taking Root.

Last January, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai (featured in the film Taking Root) offered Community Cinema a few words to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of community service.

As we gear up for Earth Day celebrations and events across the country, we wanted to reflect on two extraordinary films that ITVS had the opportunity to take out to communities through broadcast and on-the-ground engagement efforts in recent years. Today and tomorrow, we’ll be catching up with filmmakers whose projects continue to have a deep impact on inspiring and sustaining individual and community action on issues related to environmental conservation. Today’s conversation features filmmaker Eugene Rosow.

What’s been happening with your film since 2010?

DIRT! The Movie has been screening continually around the country at a wide range of community and educational events as part of the film’s outreach and public engagement campaign.  There have been several hundred such screenings and they’re still going on!  For example, in the next couple of days, the film is screening four times in honor of Earth Day. The reactions to the film from reviewers and viewers have been terrific.

I am currently working on an e book project that combines text, film, and enhanced interactivity, as well as an interdisciplinary, cross cultural, problem solving curricular model for higher education that focuses on teaching sustainability.

What are you most proud of in terms of the impact you’ve seen your film make on an individual (or a group)?

From the beginning of the project we intended to make a film that would empower audiences; to show that dirt is a living substance that requires our participation in preserving this ultimate natural resource.

We examined our species’ catastrophic environmental practices that threaten the soils our very existence depend upon, but we didn’t want to leave audiences with a hopeless helpless feeling.  So we presented the point of view that sustainable solutions to human made problems are very much within our reach, and showed some of them.

Every Q&A I’ve participated in people in the audiences said the film inspired them to action.  Frequently people say “What can I do?”  And other members of the audiences pitch in with suggestions.  Such actions have included participation in School Gardening Programs, faith based activities to provide healthy food to those in need and to renew a commitment to environmental health as an ethical position, shared information about Community Supported Agriculture, and citizen action initiatives.  Please see our site at www.dirtthemovie.org for more information.

What will you be doing on Earth Day this year?

Getting my hands dirty — planting three kinds of peppers, zucchinis, and tomatoes in my community garden plot and supporting organizations working on environmental protection and sustainability issues. Please see the partner list on our website above as well as www.earthday.org

What do you love most about being a filmmaker?

The opportunity to explore new worlds I wouldn’t know about otherwise, meet amazing people with astonishing perspectives, work with talented filmmakers, and if I do my job right — make a difference with what I love to do: to bring about a better world.

Celebrate Earth Day with a Social Screening of the documentary Garbage Dreams on Tonight at 9PM EDT / 6PM PDT.