Director: Gayle Ferraro

Logline: Tapping into the success of Muhammad Yunus after winning the Nobel Peace Prize (2006), Grameen America has opened in Queens, NY replicating the banking model program Yunus first started in Bangladesh.

Synopsis: What prevents poor people from getting ahead? Banks refuse to give credit without collateral. Where commercial banks see insolvency, Nobel Prize–winning economist Muhammad Yunus sees opportunity. His groundbreaking Grameen Bank was built on the radical notion that if you loan poor women money within the context of peer support, not only will they repay and sustain the bank, but they’ll elevate their communities in the process.

With millions of microloans to rural entrepreneurs in developing countries, Grameen is now audaciously importing its methods to the bastion of first-world capitalism: the U.S.A. First stop: Queens, New York. With an intimate camera capturing both buoyant and despairing moments, To Catch a Dollar chronicles the evolution of the tiny new branch. Will the solidarity principles translate to a diverse group of inner-city women? As the banking industry collapses, will these intrepid social-justice financiers succeed? One thing’s clear: we need new models to ensure prosperity for all.

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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 story has evolved into a story of people working together which is larger than the sum of its parts.  Tapping into the success of Muhammad Yunus after winning the Nobel Peace Prize (2006), Grameen America has opened in Queens, NY replicating his banking model after the program he started in Bangladesh. Opening in a developed country soon has its challenges for Dr. Yunus, the new bank workers and the women who hope to change their lives with the money-generating collateral-free loans that offer them hope to live better lives.  The film portrays the integrity of the poor and the fixed mind-sets of the rich in an economic environment that ultimately reveals a deeper view of what really works.

Project Status

We are working towards a fine cut and hope to lock picture the first week of October. Check out a recent series of posts by Gayle Ferraro from the 2009 Skoll World Forum at Filmmaker magazine.

Suggested links for additional information

Aerial Productions
Berkeleymedia.com
Grameenamerica.com
Grameenfoundation.org
Microcreditsummit.org
Gangesrivertoheaven.com

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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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Director: Patrick Reed
Producer: Peter Raymont

Kenya has long been Africa’s success story—stable and ethnically harmonious.

After the presidential election in December 2007, everything changed. Voting controversy split the country along ethnic lines. A thousand people were killed and half a million displaced, pushing Kenya toward civil war, if not genocide. Dignitaries intervened, brokering peace, and establishing a fragile power-sharing government, but the post-election fallout persists. Ethnic suspicion has replaced harmony, and the country’s consumed by collective soul-searching.

The government is setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but many dismiss it as hollow political theatre, posturing for the international community. An alternative local response to the post-election violence seems superficial by comparison but is potentially more impactful: produce a TV soap opera series, hoping taboo storylines can bridge ethnic divisions and help transform a nation.

Starting in December 2008, a Kenyan production company began work on a TV drama series, “The Team,” following the struggles of a fictional soccer team to overcome their ethnic differences, both on and off the pitch. There’s inherent drama behind any TV production: will deadlines be met; will it be good; will it find an audience? But here the stakes are exponentially higher: if you don’t captivate an audience, you risk further losing your country.

This will be a dramatic, character-driven, feature documentary, following characters on and off the set, exploring how lives are reflected in the soap, and vice-versa, blurring lines between art and reality. We have total access to the entire process, have completed the first shoot—capturing the dramatic casting process—will return to Kenya throughout production, and when the show airs.

All the ingredients for a compelling feature film are here: a skilled team of filmmakers; a stunning location; an unfolding process that is inherently visual and dramatic; an uncertain outcome that could have repercussions for both other conflicts and media’s potential to make a difference. A place ripe for transformation, but that’s also teetering on the brink. What can a soap opera achieve in this volatile context? Watch and see.

Project Update

Patrick Reed and his veteran crew (Chris Romeike – Cinematographer, Ao Loo – Sound Recordist) have just returned from their third and final trip to Kenya marking the completion of principal photograph on The Team.  The crew was in Kenya to capture a major milestone for the soap opera.  The producers of the series visited camps severely affected by post-election violence, established mobile cinemas there and invited those in camps to screen the series.  Patrick and his team were on the ground to film the impact of the series on those who have been most affected by the civil unrest in Kenya over the last year and a half.

Now that production has wrapped Patrick will enter the edit suite with long time collaborator Michele Hozer (Triage: Dr James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma) to begin editing the film for completion in January 2010.

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Logline: Poor Consuelo Conquers the World tells the story of popular soap operas and telenovelas, now being used to combat the effects of poverty around the world.

It all started by accident in 1969, when a Peruvian telenovela character worked her way out of poverty using a sewing machine; and suddenly sewing machines flew off the shelves by the thousands all over Peru. That incident, combined with the social modeling theories of psychologist Albert Bandura demonstrating the power of fictional media characters to act as role models and affect behavior of viewers, inspired a brilliant Mexican director named Miguel Sabido to create popular telenovelas designed both to entertain and to address urgent social issues. His first series was a huge commercial hit and demonstrably contributed to a significant decline in birthrates in heavily overpopulated Mexico. He revised and refined his formula until it became a scientific methodology that soon spread around the world with success after success, and ultimately helped create an entire field, now known as Entertainment-Education. Sabido essentially created an affordable, exportable model for socially sustainable development, all while creating hit show after hit show. Like Sabido’s work, our documentary Poor Consuelo Conquers the World is both entertaining and solution-oriented in its approach to social change.

In the Spring of 2009 we filmed the creation of a radionovela produced by Radio Atipiri and Media Impact, in El Alto, Bolivia, one of the poorest cities in South America. Radio is cheap to produce and reaches people who can’t afford TV. The station we filmed even reaches people who can’t afford radio by simultaneously broadcasting from loudspeakers on the roof of their station! Excerpts from this footage helped Poor Consuelo win the award for Best Project Presentation for Cinema at the 2009 Sunny Side Documentary Market in La Rochelle, France. YLE-TV Finland then joined our team, with others soon to follow. Stay tuned! Development support provided by ITVS.

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We’ll interweave Jones’ national efforts with the local stories of men and women enrolled in the Oakland Green Job Corps training program. We’ll follow them during the 16-week program, where they will gain green construction skills that they hope will change their lives. The trainees are primarily African-American and Latino men who struggle with common barriers to employment: lack of formal education, lack of job skills, and history in juvenile/criminal justice system.

Project Update

Green Shall Overcome was one of eight films selected by The Good Pitch to present our film at AFI/SILVERDOCS. The response was tremendous. There was a unanimous sense of excitement about Jones’ work, the trailer, and the incredible timeliness of the conversation. One of the funders sitting at our table was so inspired they made a contribution of $10,000 in the middle of the presentation.

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To some she is a radical out for trouble. To others she represents a bright post-Taliban future. Sakena Yacoobi’s weapon of choice –books and the Afghan Institute for Learning, a grassroots organization she founded 12 years ago. Using a combination of intimate stylized interviews, archival news footage, the occasional “home-movie” and verite footage, BACK TO SCHOOL will weave together these narratives: Sakena’s personal story of a growing up in war-torn Afghanistan and the experiences that led her to found the Afghan Institute of Learning and her current day-to-day struggle to keep the Learning Centers open, operational and “safe”.

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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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Logline: $H*T! follows radical solutions that turn human waste into green energy. It opens up possibilities for a whole new green and clean world and a better future for the world’s 2.6 billion people who lack access to sanitation. From the bottom of the poverty ladder to the heights of power, $H*T! shows a transformation in thinking, where human waste is not a problem – it’s a resource.

You’ll be sorry you flushed!

Human waste is a universal reality few want to talk about, but the truth is – it’s a killer.
In the West, under-dimensioned and decaying sewage systems leak straight into our basements and rivers. In some places, the system has already collapsed, contaminating water sources so that drinking water has to be trucked in.

Almost 40% of the world’s population have no access to basic  sanitation. That’s 2,6 billion people who have no choice but to do their business in the open, posing the single largest threat to drinking water and public health on the planet.

It seems inescapable. But what if all that poo wasn’t a threat? What if it could save the planet?

$H*T! is an international wake-up call for changing our attitudes to how we deal with our own waste. It’s a character driven film that will show solutions that will not only improve worldwide sanitation and reduce child mortality, poverty, and inequality, but do it by turning this deadly problem into the resource it is. A resource that can provide energy and clean fertilizer, all while cutting down on fossil fuel and CO2 emissions in the process. In addition to the film, we’re preparing an extensive multi-platform strategy with the end goal to inform, empower, and support those who want to effect change.
$H*T! is a one of a kind documentary meant for a global TV audience. It has a built-in audience appeal, tempering the hard facts with a giggle factor born of our massive collective taboo. Our target audience reaches further than the already converted enviro-friends – we want to reach the people that don’t know that they care yet.  Bottom line is, whether we flush our shit or lay it in the open, it ultimately affects us all. It’s past time we started talking about it.

www.bedouinviking.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Beeep/139974822715933?v=app_2309869772#!/pages/Beeep/139974822715933?v=wall

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