Filmmaker Andy Abrahams Wilson gives us this inside look at the inspiration behind the app and his take on the changing interactive media landscape:

How did making The Grove inspire your idea for Tributopia?

The AIDS Memorial Grove founders envisioned a nature-based memorial in which individuals could till their grief and find comfort in seeing their own human experience reflected in nature. While the stigma of AIDS created invisible victims and survivors often excluded from traditional rituals of burial and remembrance, having a special place to remember and share was especially important.

While I was in the midst of production on The Grove, I vacationed in Mexico and witnessed scores of roadside memorials adorned with flowers, pictures, and photos. I was mesmerized and wanted to know what happened and whom it happened to. It was as if those shrines wanted to speak to me, to tell me their story. I began to realize how vital the connection was between memory and place, and between community and communication.  Hence, the idea for Tributopia was born: a way to use new media to tell stories of loss – to connect memories to place and join in a community of remembrance.

What was the experience like, going from being a “traditional” documentary filmmaker to working in the interactive media space? Was there a large learning curve?

There was an enormous learning curve. We tend to take for granted our mastery over our own craft. Suddenly I found myself facing a technology, terminology and business model that were alien to me. While we cling to the idea of “storytelling” as a unifying theme and comforting commonality, I really did feel like I was entering a brave new world!

Remember when we though the shift from linear to non-linear editing was such a giant step? That was a mere shuffle compared to this inexorable leap to non-linear storytelling. I guess I’m supposed to flow with it, but I still find myself rebelling. I don’t think I want to give up the artistic control of the auteur. On the other hand, I enjoy the democracy and direct engagement that the interactive media space engenders. While often this tends to be quite shallow, I think our app provides a vehicle for some of the more meaningful reflection and empathy associated with the longer, linear documentary form.

What did you take away from this experience?

A really cool app that I hope can help alter the way we collectively mourn.

Any advice you’d give to other filmmakers thinking of taking the leap into the world of apps?

It’s going to cost a lot more and take a lot more time than you think. And you thought filmmaking was expensive?!

Tell us a bit about the app.

The name Tributopia is a fun play on and combination of words: tribute, tribe, topia (Greek for “place”), utopia (no place). All these words, roots, and concepts are relevant to the app. In a simple sense, it’s a place for tributes, but it also recognizes that a tribe that has “no place” still has to come together.

In an increasingly sped-up, mobile, and fractured world, we’ve lost rituals and places for mourning. More and more, people are being cremated or live far from where loved ones are buried. Less and less we have places to mourn and a community to mourn with. And yet look at the spontaneous, makeshift, or cultivated memorials that appear where great tragedy befalls or a famous person dies: the Boston Marathon bombing, the Newtown Massacre, Steve Jobs, Lady Di – the National AIDS Memorial.

Tributopia taps into a fundamental human need as an engaging, celebratory way to create virtual memorials by posting tributes on an interactive map. By connecting places to memories, we fill our world with stories of loss and remembrance that can be discovered, shared and, in a way, immortalized.

With other memorial apps out there, what sets Tributopia apart?

What sets Tributopia apart is its emphasis on connecting memories to place. Other memorial apps remain in a lofty, sentimental space of remembrance, often represented by clouds and distant heavens.

Tributopia is participatory. It invites engagement and connection by bringing memories “down to earth” to the places they and we live, making those past lives more real and informing our own in the present.

Of the many features included in the app, which is your favorite?

My favorite is the augmented reality “Eye View” feature, whereby the user looks through the viewfinder and can find virtual tributes overlaying the real world around them. This really excites me: bringing the past into the present, and layering images and stories over the places we inhabit. It’s a way of connecting with, remembering, and learning from those who came before us – our tribe.

You decided to launch Tributopia around Memorial Day and just before Pride Month. Why? 

The app took much longer to develop than expected. We had hoped to launch it in conjunction with the PBS premiere of The Grove on World AIDS Day. But in lieu of that, it seemed Memorial Day was the right choice. As a virtual memorial app that includes, but now goes far beyond the issue of AIDS, Tributopia’s launch on Memorial Day, followed closely by Gay Pride Month, is a two-for-one punch.

What plans do you have for the future?

If we get enough financing there’s so much more we could do with the app to help revolutionize our relationship with mourning and loss. But in the meantime, I’m making movies!

Andy Abrahams Wilson is an award-winning producer and director of creative non-fiction films, including the acclaimed, Oscar-shortlisted Under Our Skin, the ITVS-funded and PBS broadcast The Grove, and the HBO documentary Bubbeh Lee & Me.  

Watch Rebel – Preview on PBS. See more from VOCES.

Loreta Velazquez, a Confederate Soldier turned Union spy, did not change the course of the American Civil War. Why would this one woman’s story, out of the three million Americans who fought in the Civil War, matter today? She was one of hundreds of women and thousands of Latino Civil War soldiers whose stories remain outside of the national narrative of history. While the US only recently lifted the ban on women in combat, she was fighting 150 years ago.

Latinos have emerged as the nation’s largest ethnic group, while, according to a Hill and Knowlton study, 1/3 of Americans believe Hispanics are recent immigrants who have come here illegally.  Few know that over 10,000 Mexicans fought in the Civil War, entire regiments who spoke only Spanish joined in battle, and that Spanish surnamed soldiers, from South Carolina to New York, joined the ranks. Loreta’s rebellious and daring character, the tragedies of her life – and her refusal to be defeated by them – made her a riveting film subject, but it was the fact that she had been erased that propelled me to make Rebel.

As Walter Benjamin has said, history decays into images. But our society has not always deemed women and minority history worthy of documentation, I had only one, not even authenticated, photo of Loreta. But her memoir and a trove of recently discovered archival documentation about her allowed me to bring her to life, using voiceovers, recreations, animation, and contemporary storytellers.

I am interested in the tension between national narratives and community histories and in the politics of gender and race in the creation of stories about the American past. In Loreta’s lifetime, proponents of the Lost Cause rejected Velazquez for her frank criticisms of the South, and for the fact that, as a Hispanic and as a woman soldier, she disturbed their carefully crafted portrayal of the Southern soldier in the Confederacy.

Today, some Hispanics may disavow her as an historical embarrassment for her loyalty to the Confederacy, while others celebrate her ability to transcend the ethnic barriers of her time. Feminists embrace her for the way she subverted gender restrictions, neo-Confederates are poised to adopt her as an apologist for the Southern cause, and historians debate whether she even existed. Velazquez elicits passionate reactions from so many groups because she disturbs assumptions about gender and ethnicity during the 19th Century. Hispanic populations in the South have exploded in the past decade, and the “race question” must now be framed in a context beyond simply black and white. Velazquez is a window into a more nuanced understanding of the South during an era that ripped apart Southern institutions and social codes.

Today, the American South continues to imagine a Civil War history that is part nostalgia, part myth. Popular histories of the Civil War often emphasize the heroism of the soldiers, at the expense of pondering the social, political, and complex racial divisions implicit in that bloodstained struggle. Yet the history of the Civil War haunts the South still, with its never-fully-answered questions about the “race problem,” as it haunts this nation. The public response to Loreta’s memoir during her lifetime, and beyond, reveals a South deeply divided over the characterization of its own losses and legacies. Her continuing absence in the national narrative raises questions about who owns history and how we define a national identity in a heterogeneous society.

What happens when a people are excluded from national history? George Orwell put it powerfully when he said, “Those who control the present, control the past. Those who control the past, control the future.”

The Living is a film about human isolation and, specifically, how shifts in the frequency and quality of human interaction might shape the American future. For many of my fellow Gen Y-ers, the notion that we’re traveling down a path of increased human isolation probably seems far-fetched and alarmist, or, at best, a non-issue. After all, we’re children of the Information Age, the first generation born into a world of mass media and wireless technology that allows us to stay in constant contact with both close friends and strangers who live thousands of miles away.

Although I recognize and enjoy the technological advances that continue to bring us closer in the virtual sense and satisfy an array of social longings, I’ve also wondered what culture shifts these innovations might encourage in the long run. As I developed the script for The Living, I pondered a host of moral quandaries that might arise in a society where human desire has been reduced at accelerated rates – where the population has normalized the practice of communicating with both strangers and loved ones at mainly a physical distance. Ultimately, I wanted to know how this continuing ethos might inform the way Americans value human life.

The story of The Living reaches 22 years into the future, where we find America in a state of reconstruction following a series of earthquakes that leveled the East Coast and left millions crippled, indigent, or both. I injected this complication because I wanted to imagine how America, the “mightiest nation in the world,” might conduct itself when unexpectedly brought to its knees. In light of the country’s vulnerable position, I wondered whose lives might be privileged in the name and process of nation-(re)building, and which lives might be considered unproductive or expendable.

Similarly I asked myself, in a society where interpersonal connection is increasingly indirect and theoretical, what might be the resultant shifts in our collective morality? And how would those shifts inform our decision-making in the face of cataclysmic circumstance? The Living zeros in on a narrative microcosm of these conversations, following two people, from different sides of privilege, as they enter into a complex and emotionally charged dialogue on the value of human life in an America where life has a price tag.

Julian Breece’s The Living is currently streaming here.

The 72nd Annual Peabody Award Luncheon on Monday, May 20, 2013. Courtesy of Lois Vossen.

Summer Pasture and two of the documentaries from the Why Poverty? series, ITVS-funded Park Avenue and Solar Mamas, aired on Independent Lens in 2012, representing the only PBS programming to be recognized at this year’s ceremony. Independent Lens Senior Series Producer Lois Vossen attended the luncheon and accepted the Summer Pasture award on behalf of the filmmakers, who were unable to attend:

“It was an honor to attend the Peabody Awards to accept a Peabody on behalf of Lynn True, Nelson Walker, and Tsering Perlo for their beautiful film Summer Pasture. Independent Lens was also awarded a Peabody for Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream and Solar Mamas, which broadcast as part of the Why Poverty? series. Winning PBS’s two Peabody Awards this year is further indication of the extraordinary and extraordinarily important work independent filmmakers do. Their unyielding passion and commitment to journalism makes them a vital part of public television. We need their voices now more than ever. It also didn’t hurt that Judd Apatow told me today how much he loves Independent Lens and that it is one of his favorite series!”

Watch Tibetan Nomads Negotiate the Crossroads Between Tradition… on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

Check out Park Avenue and Solar Mamas, which are currently streaming online along with eight other programs from the Why Poverty? series on pbs.org. Congratulations to the filmmakers on this incredible achievement and to our colleagues at PBS and WGBH WORLD for broadcasting the series.

Watch Why Poverty? Preview on PBS. See more from Why Poverty?.

Ariana Klay

Ariana Klay, a Naval Academy graduate and Iraq war veteran, was featured in the Academy Award-nominated film The Invisible War. Despite harsh retaliation for stepping forward, Klay and other survivors of military sexual assault sued the Department of Defense for their inaction to punish and prevent rape within the U.S. military.

Elle Helmer

Elle Helmer, a former Barracks public information officer, was featured in the Academy Award-nominated film The Invisible War. Despite harsh retaliation for stepping forward, Helmer and other survivors of military sexual assault sued the Department of Defense for their inaction to punish and prevent rape within the U.S. military.

Kate Guttormsen

A West Point graduate, Major Kate Pendry Guttormsen served on Team Lioness during the Iraq war. Team Lioness was a unit made up of approximately 20 women that went out on missions despite a Department of Defense policy banning women from direct ground combat (which was overturned in 2013). She was featured in the Women and Girls Lead Film Lioness.

Loreta Velazquez

Loreta Janeta Velazquez, a Cuban immigrant, fought for the Confederacy disguised as a man at First Bull Run and Shiloh, then spied as a double agent for the Union in the American Civil War. Her story is retold in the Women and Girls Lead film Rebel, broadcasting on PBS May 24th.

Lori Piestewa

Single mom Lori P. Piestewa was the first Native American woman in history to die in combat while serving with the U.S. military and the first woman in the U.S. armed forces killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ann Dunwoody

Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman in U.S. military history to achieve a four-star officer rank. She first served as a second lieutenant in the Women's Army Corps in 1975. Before retiring in 2012, she led the Army Material Command, which is one of the largest commands in the Army at 69,000 employees in 50 states and 145 countries.

Frances Clalin

Frances Clalin donned a man’s uniform and the name Jack Williams in order to fight for the Union Army alongside her husband in the Civil War. Clalin fought in 17 battles, was wounded a total of three times, taken prisoner once, and watched her husband die in battle before her identity was finally discovered.

Inez Stroud

Inez Stroud served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and then the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1969. She had three tours in Germany and served as an organist and saxophonist in the WAC band.

Kady Brownell

Kady Brownell was appointed Daughter of the Regiment and color bearer during the Civil War. She was the only female to receive discharge papers from the Union Army, and was awarded a military pension in 1882.

Millie Louise Dunn Veasey

Millie Louise Dunn Veasey served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women’s Army Corps from 1942 to 1945. After her discharge, Veasey attended college on the GI Bill earning a degree in business and later became the first woman to lead the NAACP Raleigh, North Carolina chapter.

Oveta Culp Hobby

Oveta Culp Hobby was the first commanding officer of the Women's Army Corps. She earned the rank of colonel as well as the Distinguished Service Medal - the first time it was awarded to a woman. She later became the first female to serve as a U.S. Secretary when Eisenhower appointed her to lead the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

In honor of Memorial Day, watch Rebel (airing May 24 on PBS’s Voces) to learn more about one neglected female figure who shaped the United States military, Loreta Velazquez, Confederate soldier and Union spy. In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of female soldiers’ long path to the present:

• During the American Revolution, in 1775, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates told Gen. George Washington that, “the sick suffered much for want of good female Nurses.” Washington beseeched Congress, which approved one nurse for every ten patients. Women also served as water bearers, cooks, laundresses, and saboteurs.
• During the Civil War, women soldiers on both sides disguised themselves as men in order to serve. In 1866, Dr. Mary Walker received the Medal of Honor. She is the only female to have been awarded this highest honor.
• In World War I, 21,480 Army nurses serve in military hospitals in the United States and overseas. Eighteen African-American Army nurses serve stateside caring for German prisoners of war (POWs) and African-American soldiers. More than 400 military nurses die in the line of duty. The majority died from the “Spanish Flu.”
• The Army establishes the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. They were the first women besides nurses to “serve within the ranks of the United States Army.” More than 150,000 women served as WACs during the war. In 1942, Nancy Harkness Love organized 25 women pilots into the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). The WAFS flew planes from the factory to military bases.
• WACs in the Vietnam War supported the troops mainly in administrative military occupational specialties (MOSs). One WAC detachment was assigned to Headquarters, first at Ton Son Nhut Airbase, then at Long Binh. “While engineers readied new barracks at Long Binh, the women lived in a building typical of the tropics, with openings between outer wallboards and no windows,” according to Army.mil. “Red dust covered their rooms during the dry season, and rain soaked them during the wet season.”
• By the end of 2004, 19 servicewomen were killed during the Iraq War. Team Lioness, featured in the documentary Lioness, was organized to search and soothe Muslim women in accordance with cultural customs. “These women in Ramadi would become the first to engage in offensive ground combat operations in this country’s history,” said Lory Manning, Director of Women in the Military Project, in an interview for Lioness.

A Small Sampling of Underacknowledged Military Women:

• Brigadier General Margaret A. Brewer was the first female brigadier general in the Marine Corps in 1978. She died Jan. 2, 2013. The Argus-Press quotes Brewer in 1980 saying she “never considered any other service … my mother insists I was singing the Marine’s Hymn when I was only five years old,” according to Marines.mil.
• Lori Piestewa was the first Native American woman to die serving for the U.S. military. A member of the Hopi tribe, she was a specialist in Iraq. Piestewa was ambushed near Nasiriyah, Iraq, on March 23, 2003. Piestewa Peak, a 2608 ft mountain in Phoenix, Arizona, is named in her honor.
• Cuban-born Loreta Velazquez, the subject of Rebel, disguised herself as a man to serve as a Confederate soldier. Her gender was discovered in New Orleans and she was discharged, but that didn’t stop her from re-enlisting. She later served as a Union spy dressed at times as a male or female.
• In 2008, Army General Ann Dunwoody become the first female four-star general in U.S. history. In August 2012, Army General Janet Wolfenbarger became the second.

For more information about upcoming broadcasts featuring inspiring women and girl leaders, visit womenandgirlslead.org.

My interest in the subject of new energy – advanced energy technologies that have historically had a hard time gaining traction because they run counter to scientific orthodoxy or have been suppressed by industrial or governmental elements – has grown over the past couple of years, even as the world has grown more in need of them. A century after Ida Tarbell published her landmark exposé of the Standard Oil Trust that led to its breakup, the list of inventors whose groundbreaking work had been ruthlessly kept from the public by way of intimidation, economic subversion, and even lethal force only continues to grow.

Recently, however, the progress made by such inventors as Andrea Rossi, whose LENR (cold fusion)-based “E-Cat” is beginning to be commercially marketed. There are a score of similar “over-unity” devices (devices generating more energy than is required to run them) in various stages of development, any of which, when allowed to come to fruition, could be nothing short of revolutionary in their ability to displace carbon-based fuels.

Return to Elektra Springs recounts a small portion of one such inventor’s journey. Will Friedrich is forced, by way of a natural disaster, to reckon with his earlier decision to remain silent in the face of dire threats. Anton, an amateur unconstrained by academic affiliations, shows him that it is indeed possible to build an over-unity device and “get away with it.” Will’s choice of whether to live in fear or follow the path of his heart and make the contribution to society that he was meant to make is one that I am optimistic the visionaries of today and tomorrow will have an easier time making.

Deej is the story of DJ Savarese (“Deej”), a gifted, young writer and an advocate for nonspeaking autistics. Once a “profoundly disabled” foster kid seemingly on the fast track to nowhere, DJ is now a first year college student with a burning desire to stand up for those whose neurological differences cause others to summarily dismiss them as incompetent, often “housing them in classrooms of easy lessons.” As writer and co-producer of Deej, he seeks to quell deep-seated fears and heal old wounds while giving others like him a voice:

“This movie reassesses hope. Yes, yes, hope is not easy or free. Yes, hope is hard…. Not a sweet, dear, hopeful collection, our film asks hope to survive challenges and to hear our dear selves freed.”— DJ Savarese

Join ITVS in congratulating the filmmakers!

My parents emigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s and I was raised with the narrative – some might say “mythology” – that America truly was a Land of Opportunity: a place where many different colored threads are woven together to form a tapestry stronger and more vibrant than if those threads been all been spun from the same field of cotton.

Born and bred in New York City, this “melting-pot” cliché was further solidified by my multicultural friends and peers. It seemed obvious to me that America was a place that gathered its strength from its diversity, and that historically, all of the growth times came out of the waves of immigrants that lapped up onto our shores, looking for a better life: Italians, Irish, Chinese, Mexican….

But as I grew older, I began to see that not all of my fellow Americans shared this perspective. While in my youth, I clung to my righteousness, over time I began to realize that my own condemnation of such black-and-white opinions was a shallow simplification itself. I was left wrestling with both sides, struggling to find compassion for an intolerance that I did not understand.

When ITVS invited me to apply for FUTURESTATES, I was thrilled because I personally love the science-fiction genre, in whatever form it takes – whether it is a narrative that asks the big existential questions or simply entertains. I was truly excited because of the mandate to use the genre as a vehicle for social allegory. As I began thinking about potential concepts, my mind kept wandering back to a story session I’d had a few months before with one of my closest friends from film school, Justin Marshall.

Justin had been working, on and off, for the better part of a year, on a treatment for a feature film. It was a bigger budget film with some action set pieces, some smart twists and reveals, and of course, this great high-concept idea: time-travel immigrants who came from a destitute future looking for a better life in the past. It was something that resonated with me immediately for a host of reasons. But I suddenly realized that there was a perfect confluence of events, and if Justin were generous enough to lend me his idea, we could build a much more intimate story on his foundation. A father and son in a green but fading near future began to emerge. The son’s first “border patrol.” A loving sister. A woman from the future. A brutal choice.

We applied, and we made it through the first round, and then the second. Draft after draft, major plot changes, characters coming and going, scenes lost to the depths of our hard drives. Eventually we were fortunate enough to get to tell a story that I hope has a clear point of view, but does not vilify. It is a story that says something about family, about compassion, and just possibly, about hope in our shared Land of Opportunity.

—Joe Turner Lin, Director

Outsider artist Peter Anton, 82, has spent decades obsessively chronicling his rollercoaster of a life into a massive, illustrated autobiography, and nothing — not poverty, isolation, or crippling disabilities — will stop him from seeing it published. Almost There documents the curatorial complexities surrounding the discovery and stewardship of Anton’s work, addressing issues of identity and legacy that arise from the collision of biography and autobiography.

Join ITVS in congratulating the filmmakers!

As an Iranian American, I find myself on both sides of an escalating geopolitical situation between the United States and Iran. When invited to pitch a story for the FUTURESTATES series, I began to realize that I wanted to further explore the potential repercussions of the brewing U.S./Iran conflict in the not-too-distant future.

As I explored the landscape and hypothesized various scenarios that I felt deserved attention, I stumbled upon two profound realizations. The first was that the nature of warfare has evolved to the point that cyber warfare is no longer rooted in fiction, but rather an aggressively approaching reality. The second was that a large number of Iranian immigrants living in the U.S. could find themselves victims of political backlash similar to the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II. I knew, however, that while history could repeat itself, it would likely not replicate the past but come in a new form.

After many drafts of a treatment for the film, I finally landed on a story that explored all the themes I envisioned, and could be told in a style that was achievable and representative of my voice as a storyteller. As the writing began, the goal was to build a character that was relatable and could serve as a vehicle through which to study and explore this not-so-distant world. An element critical to the film was the theme of a world where technology, immigration, and government had dovetailed in potentially perilous ways. Within this context, I wanted to look at the question of why immigrants are often willing to pay a high price to live a life that many of us take for granted.

With Sonia, we have a young, ambitious, and independent character that left a troubled situation in Iran to pursue an education and the American dream – which ultimately proves to resemble more of a nightmare. I wanted to place Sonia in a situation and give her a choice to make which blended irony and allegory, and which directly conflicted her values. Ultimately, Refuge is a story about a character facing an extraordinary circumstance, and falling victim to a geopolitical conflict reflective of a world we could all soon live in.

— Mohammad Gorjestani, Writer/Director