In a culture steeped in tradition and obsessed with marriage, how do you find love, companionship, and partnership when you are HIV-positive? MATCH + is a narrative documentary film that tells the story of the growing movement for HIV-positive marriage matchmaking in India.

Suggested Links for additional information

South Asian American Films and Arts Association
YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education
Avahan – AIDS Sutra book
AIDS Jaago

Directors Previous Films

Unnatural Causes
Global Values 101: A Short Course
Forgotten Ellis Island
Postcards From Buster

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Since I am in the final stages of production and into post on a feature doc (To Catch a Dollar –WT) portraying 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Grameen Bank Founder and the patron saint of all social entrepreneurs (according to Patricia Finneran Sr. Consultant for Sundance Institute) Dr. Muhammad Yunus AND the film project is a recipient of a generous grant from the Skoll Foundation (Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change) – one could say that it is quite fitting that I participate in this event. Add to that I briefly attended Oxford ten years ago (before switching up for Harvard) and have some familiarity with the University and surrounds so it is an experience I feel very comfortable and engaged in as I arrive on site. Read the entire Day 1 post>>

Read Day 2>>

Read Day 3>>

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In 2008, STORIES OF CHANGE launched a request for proposals and received more than 300 film projects filmmakers around the world interested in telling the stories of social entrepreneurs.  An advisory committee, including CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, celebrated documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) and Skoll Foundation senior advancement officer Sandy Herz, made recommendations. 10 films have  been chosen, with the first films likely to be completed  as early as 2010.

On hand for the announcement were Jeff Skoll, Founder & Chairman, Skoll Foundation, Sandy Herz, Senior Advancement Office, Skoll Foundation, Ken Brecher, Executive Director, Sundance Institute, Pat Mitchell, President & CEO, The Paley Center For Media, and Cara Mertes, Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program.

The five new STORIES OF CHANGE Grant Award Recipients are:

CONNECTED
Director: Jonathan Stack
Social Entrepreneur: Aloy Chife
Nigerian entrepreneur Chife is making an unrelenting effort to shrink Africa’s digital divide by bringing information technology to those who need it most.

EASY LIKE WATER
Director: Glenn Baker
Social Entrepreneur: Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan
In Bangladesh, Architect Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan’s solar-powered floating schools are turning the front lines of climate change into a community of learning.

TO CATCH A DOLLAR: MUHAMMAD YUNUS BANKS ON AMERICA (working title)
Director: Gayle Ferraro
Social Entrepreneur: Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus, known for developing the concept of microcredit,  reached seven and a half million poverty-stricken families in Bangladesh with his Grameen Bank. This film profiles the Nobel Prize winner’s newest location in Queens, New York, and 500 women borrowers.

SH*T!
Directors: Annika Gustafson and Phil Jandaly
Social Entrepreneurs: Various
This remarkable film shows viewers how to save the planet, save money while they do it, and have a laugh or two in the meantime.

THE REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISTS
Directors: Maren Grainger-Monsen, Nicole Newnham
Social Entrepreneur:  Amlan Ganguly
In the slums of Calcutta, Ganguly, a lawyer turned social entrepreneur, empowers children to become “health minders” in their communities, which causes malaria and diarrhea rates to drop, and neighborhoods to transform.

“Social entrepreneurs are working on some of the biggest challenges facing humanity: from climate change, to water scarcity, to ethnic, political and socio-economic conflicts.  These visionaries have created workable solutions to tough problems, and it is critical to tell their stories, not only to inform but also to inspire,” said Sally Osberg, President and CEO of Skoll Foundation. “We are extremely pleased with the caliber of filmmaker submissions to the STORIES OF CHANGE initiative, and look forward to seeing the outcome of these unique collaborations.”

“It is truly extraordinary to be able to provide funding for these important projects in this difficult economic climate,” said Cara Mertes, Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program. “In their optimism, integrity and intelligence, the films that are launching today reflect the deep challenges we face as a global community, tempered  with the ingenuity and commitment to effective, transformative change that social entrepreneurs exemplify.”

Speaking at the Skoll World Forum Opening Plenary, Sundance Institute Executive Director Ken Brecher said, ” Film is the medium for modern storytelling, and the power of storytelling as an agent for change is tremendous. The goal of STORIES OF CHANGE is to unite these creative forces and bring about not simply awareness but also solutions to the issues of our time.”

This is the third year Sundance Institute has participated in the Skoll World Forum. 2009 Sundance Filmmaker Fellows also participating in the Forum include Robert Kenner (FOOD, INC.), Gayle Ferraro (Muhammad Yunus’ Vision for America (WT)), Greg Barker (SERGIO), and Jon Alpert (BAGHDAD E.R.).

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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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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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