Season 6
Title: Guns, Books, and Playgrounds
Producer: Aaron Blandon
Description: Excerpted from a larger project, Guns, Books, and Playgrounds presents a group of inter-Philadelphia children, 14 to 16-years-old, who have gathered to discuss and debate the issue of violence in the city. The students come from varied sections of the city, and although they are given instructions on the form of the debate, they are given no restrictions and supervise the debate themselves. Most of them have been touched, if only peripherally, by the violence in Philadelphia, notwithstanding the murder of one of their classmates, months prior to the taping. Their youthful exuberance and proximity to the issue lead them to challenge each other’s assumptions and ideas. Their need to express and translate their place is presented naturally, openly, and with a refreshing lack of agenda.
Title: Minding the Hive
Producer: Sarah J. Christman
Description: Humans have harnessed the remarkable production of the honeybee for thousands of years. Recent widespread population decline among commercial bee operations has focused attention on the long overlooked honeybee. With one third of our diet dependent on honeybee pollination, the stakes are high for bees and people alike. While scientists race to determine a cause for this mysterious 'colony collapse disorder', beekeepers continue to persevere against countless viruses and environmental stresses that increasingly threaten their hives. In this critical moment, "Minding the Hive" closely observes the essential relationship between honeybees and beekeepers. Dispelling the misconception of bees as a hazard and nuisance, we witness bees and people co-existing in surprising settings-- from a cow pasture to a suburban backyard, to a rooftop in center city Philadelphia. Through the personal stories of five local beekeepers, the film reveals the complex intersection of nature, people, and technology. Viewed variably as bread-winner, pet, and inspiration, the beehive reflects these young beekeepers' own desires for support and self-sufficiency in a changing environment.
Title: The Passion of Ursula Rucker
Producer: Michael J. Dennis, Director/Editor, with Craig Carpenter and Bianca M. White
Description: Poet, Activist, Wife, Mother and Friend. Internationally acclaimed poet and spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker first gained fame for her recorded collaborations with fellow Philly musicians King Britt and The Roots. Having released three solo CDs and toured the world, she is profiled for the first time in this revealing new documentary from the maker of Jazzyfatnastees: In Process (Philadelphia Stories Season2) Featuring exclusive "unplugged" performances of some of her best known work and testimonies by friends, family, collaborators and peers, we gain insight into what makes her such a unique and powerful voice. With appearances by Dr. Sonia Sanchez, Saul Williams, King Britt, Wadud Ahmad, Lyrispect and The Roots.
Title: One City‑ Four Fates
Producer: Yakvalkhodjiev Furkat
Description: One City, Four Fates is about four people who live in Philadelphia. The story’s first character, who works at an art gallery, has been living in Philadelphia for over 10 years. The second character is a young girl who has not been living in Philadelphia for too long. She is 12 years old. The next character came to Philadelphia to get education. The situations in the Philadelphia hospitals differ dramatically from the city this character lived in before. Last but not least, for the fourth character, Philadelphia is considered to be her mother land, and she is able to tell a tale about this city. The first three of the characters in the film are originally from Uzbekistan. The Uzbek community in Philadelphia is very small, and the film gives us an opportunity to get to know some of the people from this community.
Title: Virtual Memory and the Random Generator
Producer: Julie Goldstein and Erika Mijlin
Description: As we approach the end of analog television in 2009, and enter a new era in the evolution of digital media, our experience of images and information becomes increasingly intangible. One part history and one part poetry, Virtual Memory is a meditation on the essence of mechanical image-making and its impact on human consciousness, from the physical process of photography and film, to the alternate universe created by computers and virtual reality. Using a compilation of found material, the film bids a kind of fond farewell to the 20th century technologies that paved the way to the present moment and the ethereal future.
Title: Hooked: Philly’s Urban Anglers
Producer: Shannon Kane-Meddock, Mike Attie and Andrew Schwalm
Description: In the unlikely setting of the city of Philadelphia, a colorful assortment of characters has one thing in common: they’ve been lured to the water. HOOKED: Philly’s Urban Anglers is an intimate, funny and touching glimpse into the little known world of urban fishing. Young Dante improvises a fishing pole with a beer can and discarded line. A fastidious Vera takes refuge on the river bank from the stress of urban living. Longtime friends, Louis and Matt, joust over the Schuylkill's biggest carp and go after them with an addict's zeal. When a good day fishing has come and gone, Philadelphia's waterways yield a bounty far more valuable than the fish themselves.
Title: Prison Life Stories
Producer: Mike Kuetemeyer, Deborah Rudman, Anula Shetty/Termite TV Collective
Description: Do you have a family member or friend who has been incarcerated? How is your life affected by it? Termite TV Collective's latest Life Story Project explores the stories that surround incarceration in Philadelphia. Prison Life Stories will challenge perceptions of what kind of people are in prison today and why. By listening to these stories audiences will see how incarceration not only affects those that are directly involved but entire families and communities.
Title: The Beirut Boys
Producer: Eugene Martin
Description: The Beirut Boys is a half-hour television show about a group of African-American teens from North Philadelphia who call themselves "the Beirut Boys". They are centered at the corner of 12th and Huntington Sts. in North Philadelphia. Derrick Toler, a 17-year-old boy who calls himself a Beirut Boy, goes in between two worlds of the "corner boys" and his own ambitions to go to college. Derrick is just graduating from CEP, a disciplinary school in Philadelphia, and over the summer, he began taping a video diary of his life as he makes the transition out of his neighborhood to Community College. El Sawyer, the director of the film and an African American filmmaker, works closely with Derek along with producer Eugene Martin to include verite footage and interviews that he and Derek filmed about the Beirut Boys' lives.
Title: The View from Amber Street, Continued
Producer: Erika Mijlin and Julie Goldstein
Description: The View from Amber Street documents a pair of industrial buildings in Philadelphia – their history, the neighborhood they inhabit, and the unique balance of manufacturers and artists who are its tenants, past and present. During the course of making the film, the buildings were sold, raising questions about the building’s future as an integrated center for art and industry. Two years after the transfer of ownership, some of the oldest manufacturing tenants have closed, and new tenants have arrived, primarily belonging to the 'creative economy'. At the crossroads of both gentrification and globalization, the Amber Street buildings are representative of a neighborhood, a city, and a national economy in transition.
Title: The Leesburg 33
Producer: S.K. Thompson
Description: After 44 years, North Philadelphia resident Gloria Westbrooks recounts the summer she was taken, along with 32 other adolescent girls, to an abandoned Civil War stockade where she was malnourished and mistreated for six-weeks after participating in a Civil Rights demonstration in Americus, Georgia in 1963. She and four other survivors recount their terrifying captivity in vivid and shocking detail.
Title: With Every Breath
Producer: Ram Devineni
Description: With Every Breath is a short documentary about African- American poet Lamont B. Steptoe, who is a long time resident of Philadelphia and Vietnam War Veteran. Steptoe, an American Book Award winner, deals with the many aspects of his life through his poetry from post-traumatic syndrome resulting from the war to his life as a gay man of color. This short poetic film encapsulates a compelling literary figure and his thirty-year life in Philadelphia.
Title: With Every Breath
Producer: Ram Devineni
Description: With Every Breath is a short documentary about African- American poet Lamont B. Steptoe, who is a long time resident of Philadelphia and Vietnam War Veteran. Steptoe, an American Book Award winner, deals with the many aspects of his life through his poetry from post-traumatic syndrome resulting from the war to his life as a gay man of color. This short poetic film encapsulates a compelling literary figure and his thirty-year life in Philadelphia.
Title: Land of the Giants
Producer: Dominic Hilton
Description: Land of the Giants is about the giant puppets and the puppeteers of the Spiral Q Puppet Theater in Philadelphia. The group builds the puppets then uses them for performances, parades and festivals. Spiral Q have an active education program, organize the annual ‘Peoplehood’ parade to promote community and diversity, and open their studio to groups needing puppets and props for demonstrations about issues such as AIDS medication, alternative transport and school funding. They also maintain the Living Loft Museum where the public can view a large collection of the giant puppets.
Title: Rah Crawford: Pop Star
Producer: Maori Karmael Holmes
Description: This video introduces Rah Crawford a Philadelphia-born contemporary pop artist who seeks to “define the modern generation through [his] art”. In just four years since his art world debut his work has graced gallery walls in New York, London and Amsterdam. He’s created art live on stage with The Roots and Outkast and Jill Scott. He has coined his own brand to describe his body of work—Neoteric Pop-Iconic Clairvoyance™ (NPIC), a technique that asks the viewer to not only study and admire the images but to seek and find hidden text or numerals within the work and associate the words or phrases with the visual to come to a more vivid understanding of the work
Title: Island Idyll
Producer: Frances McElroy and Ann Tegnell
Description: Island Idyll is the story of a commercial fishing town that for generations of vacationing families has provided a “healthy respite” from urban life and been a haven for “quirky individualists.” A two-block wide strip of sand lined with tiny beach cottages and a trailer-park, the town lies adjacent to some of the most expensive and desirable real estate in New Jersey. With ocean and bayside property increasingly attractive to developers, the town is vulnerable to the same economic pressures that have altered shore communities up and down our American coasts. With each new mega-house, affordable housing vanishes along with the working families and seniors who form the heart of the town. There is real fear that Strathmere will soon become nothing more than another resort town for wealthy summer-people.
Title: Berks and Belgrade
Producer: Michael O'Reilly
Description: E. Berks St and Belgrade St. is an intersection in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Berks and Belgrade is also the name of the film inspired by that intersection. Having lived with a birds-eye view of the cross streets for five years, filmmaker Michael O’Reilly accumulated footage and stories of the events that happened there – drug deals and “corner boys” - there are images of the hands of these men with the word "Berks" on the right and the word "Belgrade" on the left. The most dramatic footage in the film is of the five-alarm fire of the nuisance store across the street - bright orange flames shooting out of every window. The subsequent demolition is captured in time-lapse, and the store is eventually reconstructed as a “green building”, significantly transforming the corner and, by extension, the entire neighborhood.
Title: On Bass
Producer: Nadine Patterson
Description: This short is Casey Montgomery’s last dream. When his daughter Zera comes home from work she discovers he has passed away. Starring Warren Oree as Casey and Sia Kpakiwa as his daughter Zera.
Title: Thank You,West Africa
Producer: Toni Shapiro-Phim and Barry Dornfeld
Description: This 5-minute video postcard is a portrait of a singer and the story of a song. Zaye Tete, now a Southwest Philadelphia resident, ived in Liberia, in the Kendeja artists’ village, before war devastated the country. Separated from her family and home, she wrote the song “Thank you, West Africa,” in 1990, to thank people in Guinea and other West African countries for taking in Liberian refugees who, like her, had been displaced, and who had fled, often with little more than the clothes on their back. The video introduces Tete, a renowned singer in Liberia, who immigrated to Philadelphia, where her family now lives. She tells about her experiences during the war and recounts the circumstances of the song’s creation. The video includes footage of Tete performances, both in a refugee camp in the 1990s and at a concert performance in Philadelphia in 2007.
Title: Asians Misbehavin’ Model Minority Man
Producer: Anula Shetty
Description: Asians Misbehavin features a blend of stand up, spoken word and sketch comedy addressing Asian American identity, racism and anti-Asian violence. Written and performed by Philadelphia based Asian American performance artists Daniel Kim, Michelle Myers, Anula Shetty and F. Omar Telan, Asians Misbehavin raises awareness of media misrepresentations of Asian Americans. In this episode, would-be superheroes Model Minority Man and Rice Rocket Kid join forces to valiantly protect fellow Asian Americans, and the myth of the model minority.
Title: Fashion First: Sneaker Kicks
Producer: Sosena Solomon
Description: Fashion First: Sneaker Kicks examines the obsession of sneaker culture, as part of the Philadelphia fashion scene. It explores the booming sneaker industry’s influence on modern pop culture in the US and focuses on it’s impact on a Philadelphia’s subculture.
Title: Down The Hatch: The Life Teachings of John “Red” Stuart
Producer: Andrew David Watson
Description: Red Stuart is a world-renowned sword swallower and sideshow performer. After retiring from the road in 1996, Red returned to his hometown of Philadelphia. Red still performs on occasion and spends his free time teaching and inspiring a whole new generation of sword swallowers. This short documentary takes a look at Red’s colorful career, life accomplishments and efforts to keep the art of sword swallowing alive.
Title: That’s Not Art
Producer: Curtis Albucher
Description: That’s Not Art is a short documentary on the mentality, personal drive, and the creative process of graffiti writers. This documentary focus’ on three Philadelphia graffiti writers, as they try to verbally explore their opinions of an illegal art form. The interviews allow the artist’s to explain their artistic goals, and justify personal strife of creating art on someone else’s personal property.
Title: Madame
Producer: Ajay Bhai and Marquise Lee
Description: An infatuated convenience store clerk strikes up a conversation with his only customer, a young lady who has other concerns on her mind. As he gets more personal and intrusive with his questions, the two are soon confronted with a situation.
Title: Brian's Run
Producer: David Block
Description: In 1978, Brian Bratcher, a promising 15-year-old football player at West Chester Henderson High, was paralyzed during a scrimmage. Stunned by the tragedy, the community organized a sponsored race to help defray Bratcher's medical costs. The race committee's goal was to get 100 participants for the one-time race and raise $500. To their amazement over 2,000 participants showed up and they raised $20,000. The injured Bratcher was overwhelmed and insisted "Next year, let's do it for someone else." Brian's Run looks at how the injury of a talented athlete has become a source of inspiration for the entire West Chester, PA community and created a 25 year tradition they never expected.
Title: Mouina: The Tree
Producer: Marc Brodzik
Description: A South Philadelphia resident named Mouina Karam showcases her; over-a-decade old Christmas tree. She uses the tree as her symbol of life, love and happiness. Interviews with her, as well as her friends, we see how the tree brings lasting inspiration and humility through every day of the year. For more than fifteen years, artist Marc Brodzik has leveraged his unique talent and artistic vision to create awareness – and most importantly -- a dialogue, around the complex cultural issues of our day.
Title: Farewell, Silk City
Producer: Alison Crouse
Description: A diner. A community. And one outrageous dessert. Set in the funky demographic of Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood, the Silk City Diner is being sold. What does this mean for the community? Where will the patrons go? And who has the recipe to that chocolate bread pudding? Last two weeks… Last call…
Title: City Taxi
Producer: Lynn Denton
Description: City Taxi, a hand-processed and hand-painted Super-8 film, is a playful, fast-paced glimpse of city images juxtaposed in a collage of color, line and shape. The movement of the film reflects the frenetic, noisy cacophony of sights and sounds experienced on a ride through city streets – a rhythmic, colorful dance set to the accompaniment of a jazz-related score by John Avarese.
Title: Career Courier
Producer: Joshua Evans
Description: Career Courier is a small look into the life of a bike messenger in the streets of Philadelphia. Though there are many bike messengers in Philly, Stephanie Stago is a bit different. While most couriers average a career of three to five years, Stephanie has been doing it her whole life or roughly twenty one years. Having survived many northeast winters and injuries that include being “doored,” which should be self explanatory considering she rides a bike in busy streets for a living; it is in “Career Courier” we hear Stephanie detail her last accident which for the first time has put a hamper on her career and lifestyle. She no longer competes in many of the pirate races put on by couriers and has difficulty in traffic when loud engines creep up behind her.
Title: St. Nicholas Authentic Italian Festival
Producer: Leonard Guercio
Description: An annual October religious and cultural event in this South Philadelphia Catholic parish, the St. Nicholas Authentic Italian Festival is a community celebration of many of their members’ Italian cultural heritage and traditions. The documentary is a brief study of the festival and also a general investigation into questions of ethnic authenticity and identity. Many of the festival celebrants are third, fourth and fifth generation Italian-Americans, having long lost contact with Italian culture and their living relatives in the land of their ancestors. Does the festival pander to a nostalgia for the past, a longing for the traditions of deceased relatives, or does it provide a tenuous connection to a way of life rapidly disappearing in the melting pot environment that is America today?
Title: Sisters of Philadelphia
Producer: K. S. Haskey
Description: Sisters of Philadelphia is the story of the Women Carpenters in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners here in Philadelphia. The director, K.S. Haskey has been a carpenter in the union for twenty five years. The crew consisted of the women themselves, telling the story of what it is like to work in an traditionally male field. They share what skills they acquired, how they learned to endure and why they wouldn't trade the experiences they've had for any other.
Title: Ship in a Bottle Works
Producer: Dominic Hilton
Description: While only in his twenties, Jonah Eaton is committing years of his life to building an ocean-going yacht from scratch, almost entirely on his own. Funded by odd jobs and timber donated by his father, Jonah is constructing his huge wooden boat in an old dairy bottling works in North Philadelphia. Upon its completion he hopes to sail across the Atlantic with his family.
Title: Prayer for Philadelphia
Producer: Richard Power Hoffmann
Description: Produced for the Great Expectations 2007 Hopes and Fears Film Competition, Prayer for Philadelphia is a 3 minute film that exorcises the city’s demons by calling out residents to fulfill William Penn’s bold dream to create a City of Brotherly Love. Constructed entirely from still photos (about 5,000), this film was selected as the Grand Prize winner out of over two dozen entries from the Philadelphia area. Great Expectations is a year long civic forum run by the Philadelphia Inquirer surrounding the 2007 mayoral election that is designed to create a dialogue among citizens concerning Philadelphia’s future. In creating Prayer for Philadelphia, Richard Power Hoffmann teamed up with longtime musical collaborators Pete Tramo and Timothy Mercer (Invisible Mountains, Fridays at the Farm) and newcomer Pecue to create the film over a period of two weeks.
Title: The Pair
Producer: Christian Janss
Description: A boy's dedication and hard work to make the school team are threatened by a chance encounter.
Title: The Basic Ingredients
Producer: Rocco V. Iacovone
Description: He’s convinced she’s cheating on him and he’s going to do something about it. See how a few basic ingredients of a movie intertwine with a confused man seeking revenge on his wife.
Title: Connections
Producer: Ron Kanter
Description: Connections… is an experimental, non-narrative documentary in which actors improvise around the key words and phrases that artists have offered to express the sources of the their inspiration, creativity, and fears. The voices are combined with music in an aural montage that mirrors a broad range of images of the artists at work, the work itself, and the ideas and images that inspired their creative process.
Title: 4021 PARKSIDE AVE.
Producer: Byron Karabatsos
Description: A hi-tech state-of-the-art general enrollment high school built in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Everyone calls it the 'Microsoft' school. Is this the future of public education?
Title: Letter to the Editor
Producer: Ish Klein
Description: Letter to the Editor is a reenactment of an experience the filmmaker had when she finally got her poem published in a reputable literary journal. It recounts her ridiculous frustrations.
Title: Charlie & Guy
Producer: Samuel Nalband
Description: Two aging homeless men forge a friendship while enduring the physical and emotional hardships of living on the street. Charles Levy (Charlie), a former salesman, scholar, and teacher, through misfortune in his life, has situated himself on a traffic island holding a sign that says simply “HOMELESS PLEASE HELP.” His partner, Guy Thompson, an ex-convict, stands adjacent on another island holding a sign with the same phrase. After five years as partners, they have grown to know and trust each other. Charlie generally makes more money, but Guy offers him security and thus they split their financial gains down the middle.
Title: City Harvest
Producer: Deborah Rudman
Description: This is the story of the City Harvest program, a collaborative partnership in gardening addressing institutional rehabilitation, community integration and improved nutrition. Through cycles of change and growth, prison inmates taking part in the “roots of re-entry” greenhouse program, network with neighborhood gardens to grow produce to be distributed to local food cupboards across Philadelphia. The documentary is an uplifting look at a radical social program changing people’s lives for the better.
Title: Illa: Explorations in Philly Identity
Producer: Michael Serazio
Description: Every city is endowed with identity – the product of innumerable forces, voices, histories, and destinies. And city identity is but a subjective negotiation of lived experience and myths of representation. Illa explores that negotiation; it seeks to articulate the unmistakable mindset marked by living in our urban space. How do locals see the character – the city zeitgeist, the spiritual fabric – of Philadelphia? How is represented to the world in the popular imagination? These questions drive this short documentary film. By using an assortment of interviews, popular culture archetypes, and emblematic visual motifs, writer and director Michael Serazio sketches a portrait of Philly’s distinctiveness: tough, cynical, and pessimistic; rooted in blue collar virtue; burdened by complex ills; and groaning under the weight of geographic chip on its shoulder. Ultimately, can an outsider – a California native at that – ever understand the mentality here, much less speak on its behalf? In a city with a face and a voice all its own, Illa: Explorations in Philly Identity tries to hold up the mirror.
Title: A Philadelphia Story
Producer: Lu Wang
Description: A female Chinese immigrant found a husband online and helps him immigrate to Philadelphia. After arriving in Philadelphia, the couple has a fight with the woman’s father; and they realize that their new married life is not easy. They both struggle to live in the new city, until an incident happens...