The project has recently begun filming, with initial interviews with founder Dorothy Stoneman, and key participants from the early years of YouthBuild, and the primary year-in-the-life focus has shifted from North Philadelphia to Newark, NJ, where there are exciting developments as YouthBuild Newark Executive Director Robert Clarke was recently awarded $5 million in government funding to replicate YouthBuild programs across the state of New Jersey.

We filmed at the YouthBuild 30th anniversary in Washington DC in March, where Dorothy Stoneman celebrated the ongoing work and the news from the Department of Labor that there would be a significant increase in funding to expand YouthBuild in 2009.  For background to the film, we have been filming with Dorothy Stoneman at the YouthBuild USA headquarters in Boston, and filmed interviews that explore the stories of her civil rights work with Leroy Looper, her former Harlem colleague and mentor, and his ongoing work in San Francisco.

In June, we filmed the announcement of the new funding, with Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Dorothy Stoneman announcing the upcoming allocation of funding for YouthBuild programs around the country.  The funding news meant good news for many more programs this year – almost two times more than were funded in 2008 – but the numbers applying were also higher, as more learn about the program, the need for YouthBuild continues to grow.  Several YouthBuild programs learn the hard news that they are not awarded DOL funding, and their operations are imperiled, as operating costs are hard to raise in the face of a full blown recession.  Dorothy rolls through calls to reassure program directors around the country that she will help to secure funding in other ways for them.  It’s a good and bad week all at once.

We recently filmed the Newark graduation, where 2009 YouthBuild participants mourned the loss of their classmate Edwin, as they celebrated their next steps into a new world of independent living; we will track a handful of the 2009 graduates to see how their lives unfold in parallel with the younger participants in the year ahead, as some may become mentors to the younger participants in an organic way through YouthBuild Newark.

Full production will begin at the start of the upcoming YouthBuild academic year, with the selection of potential YouthBuild candidates and their immersion into mental toughness training starting in mid and late August, and we will be filming the Newark and parts of the North Philadelphia mental toughness training programs.  Both groups have had significant increases in the numbers of youth applying; with no advertising or active recruitment, Newark recently received over 2000 applications for approximately 200 spots.

The film may open with a poignant scenes that illustrate the stakes these young people face.  In May 2009, a young man is gunned down and killed in Boston in a suspected gang retalitaion; at the sentencing, the judge reads the young man’s unmailed application letter to YouthBuild, filled with hope to change the path of his life.   In July, a YouthBuild Newark 2009 graduate is shot and killed one week before he is to graduate.  The news was extremely hard for the YouthBuild Newark family, as Edwin Munoz is the fourth Newark participant in the past two years who was killed before reaching the end of the program.

Over the year, the film will journey at key moments to other YouthBuild programs in North Philadelphia, Brownsville TX, Minneapolis and San Francisco, to explore how youth are transforming diverse communities while battling similar economic and personal challenges.

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Logline: My Perestroika tells the story of the last generation of Soviet children brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition.

Synopsis: Tracking the lives of five childhood classmates, the film explores how Communism’s crossover children are adjusting to their post-Soviet reality in Moscow’s booming metropolis. At first glance, for today’s Russians, their lives are completely different from how they would have lived in the USSR. They are the new and invisible middle class – raising their own children in a world they couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams. But have those changes ultimately proved to be only superficial?

In this film, there are no talking head historians, no expert witnesses, no omniscient narrator telling viewers how to interpret events. Instead, Borya, Lyuba, Andrei, Olga and Ruslan share their personal stories. They take us on a journey through their Soviet childhoods, their youth during the country’s huge changes of Perestroika, and let us into their present-day lives. The film interweaves their contemporary world with rare home movie footage from the 70s and 80s in the USSR, along with official Soviet propaganda films that surrounded them at the time. Their memories and opinions sometimes complement each other, and sometimes contradict each other, but together they paint a complex picture of the challenges, dreams, and disillusionments of this generation in Moscow today.

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Our School tells the story of Roma children struggling to break the barriers of segregation in a small Transylvanian town.

Roma, also known as “Gypsies,” are Europe’s largest and most persecuted minority. The descendants of former slaves, Romanian Roma continue to live in poverty, at the edges of society. They suffer discrimination in all areas of their life, and their children are often placed in segregated schools which offer no future. Our School documents one of the first integration efforts following a European Court of Human Rights judgment similar to Brown v. Board of Education in the United States.

Our School reveals the detailed and messy workings of race relations in a small Transylvanian town, following the lives of participants from up close in a warm, intimate visual style. The film builds the world in which the participants live by slowly drawing viewers into the minutiae and rhythms of the small Transylvanian town. The arc of the story is constructed around the hopes, wins, and losses of the children themselves. At the same time, the world of the adults who are making crucial decisions for these children (parents, teachers, friends and neighbors), as well as the town as a whole (as represented by the racist mayor or the sympathetic bookstore owner) are also explored to allow viewers to understand the intricate web of motivations which affect the main story line.

Our School shows the way in which human rights principles and well-intentioned policies play on the ground, in the daily lives of those directly affected by them. It takes a close look at the role that local context, history, and culture play in complicating and distorting the dynamics and outcomes of even the most basic and benign efforts for change. At the same time, by telling a compelling human story, the film hopes to extend awareness of segregation beyond a small circle of activists, mobilizing new energies at a moment that is ripe for change and providing a platform for the wider desegregation movement by means of a far-ranging web-based strategy linking audiences to activists and donors.

Principal photography in Romania was completed in 2008, and the project is currently in post-production in New York. Release 2010.

Suggested links for more information

The Roma Education Fund, the leading foundation developing desegregation programs in Europe
Romani CRISS, the leading Roma NGO in Romania
The European Roma Rights Centre
The Decade of Roma Inclusion, a commitment by Central and Eastern European Government to improve the situation of Roma by 2015, with the support of the World Bank and the Open Society Institute
Separate and Unequal, a source book for combating discrimination in education published by the Public Interest Law Institute
Open Society Institute-published data on Roma education
Professor Jack Greenberg of the Columbia Law School, civil rights crusader who helped litigate Brown v. Board of Education, on Roma rights and education in Europe
Video of Senator Hillary Clinton addressing the plight of the Roma at Columbia University
Romanian poet laureate Mircea Cartarescu on Romania’s “Gypsy” problem

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Easy Like Water is a feature documentary about floating schools, solar power, and the fate of the earth.

In Bangladesh, solar-powered floating schools are turning the front lines of climate change into a community of learning.  As the water steals the land, one man’s vision is re-casting the rising rivers as channels of communication, and transforming people’s lives.

Mohammed Rezwan, an architect by training, has conjured up the equivalent of environmental Jujitsu, harnessing the power of water to educate and unify the community. With a fleet of 88 boats and internet-connected computers powered by the sun, his project is bringing education to rural Bangladeshis, including many girls who have never had access to school before.

The film will dramatically demonstrate how, as rising waters threaten to create millions of refugees worldwide, climate change is becoming the gravest human rights challenge of our time. Yet Easy Like Water offers hope: it is an inspiring story of local people creating resilient strategies with appropriate technology.  In the context of the stark realities, this message of tenacity and action will galvanize audiences.

Project Update

Easy Like Water is pleased to announce support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The film has been invited to participate in the Good Pitch forum at IFP’s Independent Film Week in New York in September 2009.  We are partnering with the U.N. Environmental Programme to present an excerpt from the film at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Suggested links for more information

Download the Easy Like Water Brochure [PDF]
Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, the Bangladeshi non-profit behind the solar school boats
UN story on the solar school boats
Potomac Media Works

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The film is as much about powerful stories of rebuilding neglected neighborhoods and transforming education in America, as it is about the personal struggles to reclaim and reinvent these promising but fragile lives.

We follow the process to select the incoming class, to the official completion of the program in June 2010.  Some may graduate, some will not…  Along the way the film explores education, poverty, and the deeply emotional and revealing process – for the leaders and the students – that is a year in the life of YouthBuild.

About YouthBuild

YouthBuild is a youth and community development program that simultaneously addresses core issues facing low-income communities: housing, education, employment, crime prevention, and leadership development. In YouthBuild programs, low-income young people ages 16-24 work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas, learn job skills and serve their communities by building affordable housing for homeless and low-income people, and transform their own lives and roles in society.  All YouthBuild students are poor and many have had experience with foster care, juvenile justice, welfare, and homelessness. Participants spend 6 to 24 months in the full-time program, dividing their time between the construction site and the YouthBuild alternative school. Community- and faith-based nonprofit organizations sponsor most programs, although some are sponsored by public agencies. Each YouthBuild program raises private and public funds to support itself. Primary support comes from the U.S. Department of Labor through a dedicated federal line item.

Project Update

DOL announces funding recipients, bringing total of YouthBuild supported programs to 228.

The project has recently begun filming, with initial interviews with founder Dorothy Stoneman, and key participants from the early years of YouthBuild, and the primary year-in-the-life focus has shifted from North Philadelphia to Newark, NJ, where there are exciting developments as YouthBuild Newark Executive Director Robert Clarke was recently awarded $5 million in government funding to replicate YouthBuild programs across the state of New Jersey. Read more >>

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The Revolutionary Optimists follows Amlan Ganguly, a lawyer-turned social entrepreneur who has made a significant impact in the poorest neighborhoods of Calcutta by empowering children to become leaders in improving health and sanitation. Using street theater, puppetry, and dance as their weapons, the children have cut malaria and diarrhea rates in half, and turned garbage dumps into playing fields. Now, pushing at the limits of optimism, Amlan is attempting to take his work into the brickfields outside Calcutta, where child laborers live and work in unimaginable conditions.

Hot-headed, theatrical, but astonishingly dedicated and sincere, Amlan is an extraordinary character who truly believes in the power of children. As a dancer, choreographer, and costume designer he brings artistry to subjects that can otherwise be difficult for film audiences to approach. The Revolutionary Optimists shows both the desperate, flawed world he is trying to change, and the vibrant, colorful world his optimism inspires.

Project Status

We are recently back from a major shoot in Calcutta and are editing a short trailer that will be ready to go up on the website in the next month. We are continuing to shoot, edit and fundraise as we follow Amlan and the children finding their voice and making change. We are honored to recently have received a development grant from ITVS and a matching grant from The Fledgling Fund.

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