Past Fresh Docs

The Mantra Trailer
by Sherri Lynn Wood
(Your mantra moment awaits—The Mantra Trailer will be at CDS, receiving mantras 6:30–7:30 p.m.)

The Soccer Project
by Rebekah Fergusson, Ryan White, Gwendolyn Oxenham, and Luke Boughen

(March 28, 2008)

This month's Fresh Docs: Work in Progress screening will be hosted by the Southern Documentary Fund (SDF). The guest facilitator will be SDF Board member Tom Whiteside (see bio below).

Two SDF projects will be featured: The Mantra Trailer by artist Sherri Wood and The Soccer Project, a documentary film by Rebekah Fergusson, Ryan White, Gwendolyn Oxenham, and Luke Boughen.

Parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism, and propaganda, The Mantra Trailer is a traveling meditation space, recording studio, and vehicle for the mysterious broadcast of the peoples' spiritual and personal mantras. Rooted in southern American Bible-belt culture and the "new age," the Mantra Trailer provides an indigenous interface for the human voice within the context of globalization. A homeopathic remedy for the mass media slogans of the day, the Mantra Trailer focuses attention on the sayings people live by, one neighborhood and voice at a time. Please visit www.mantratrailer.com.

Sherri Lynn Wood is an improvisational quilt maker with a n M . F . A . in s culpture from Bard College and a m aster 's in t heological s tudies from Emory University. Most of her creative projects spring from her daily life experiences and quest for personal growth. She often invites others into the art - making process as a way of sharing interior realities and exploring civic relationships that can lead to personal and social change. She has a private practice working in her studio with people who are grieving or in transition to make functional improvisational quilts from the clothing of the deceased and the intimate materials of life. She is based in Durham, North Carolina.

Around the globe the only thing humans attend more than soccer games is church. The Soccer Project follows two players, Luke and Gwendolyn, as they abandon their jobs and travel the world in search of pick-up soccer games: impromptu scenes that arise anywhere, between anyone. The first leg of production for The Soccer Project took place last fall over three months of filming in South America. The film features soccer stories from across the continent: old men who play every Sunday morning in Santos, Brazil; gauchos who play in the countryside of Uruguay; prisoners in La Paz who play to pass the time. The stories are linked by Luke and Gwendolyn's reflections on their own soccer careers and relationship with the game as they travel from place to place. 

Rebekah Fergusson is a 2007 graduate of Duke University with a degree in English and a Certificate in Documentary Studies. Also a captain for Duke women's soccer, she received the Coaches Award in 2006. She has interned with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham and the Empowerment Project in Chapel Hill, and worked as an instructor for the Center for Documentary Studies Video Institute. 

Ryan White is the owner of Tripod Media LLC. Most recently, he worked as associate producer for eight-time Emmy-winner Sherry Jones on pieces including Capitol Crimes (Bill Moyers, PBS) and Dead Wrong: Inside an Intelligence Meltdown (CNN). White graduated cum laude from Duke University in 2004 with a degree in literature and certificates in Documentary Studies and Film & Video. 

At sixteen, Gwendolyn Oxenham was the youngest Division 1 athlete in the history of the NCAA. She captained the Duke soccer team, led the team in assists, was an All-ACC selection, and was named Most Inspirational Player. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing at Notre Dame. She was the recipient of the Nicholas Sparks Prize, a $20,000 post-graduate grant to finish a first book. Oxenham graduated cum laude from Duke in 2004 with a degree in English and a Certificate in Documentary Studies. 

Before leaving for South America, Luke Boughen was working as an account executive for Lamar Advertising. A Notre Dame graduate and soccer player, Boughen was a Big East Academic All-Star for four years and was selected for the Student Athlete Academic Honors Program. Fluent in Portuguese, Boughen was an anthropology major who studied abroad and played daily pick-up soccer in Rio de Janeiro.

Tom Whiteside has been making, curating, and exhibiting film since 1979, when he graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures. Interests include experimental film, regional film history, and the intersection of motion pictures with music and fine arts. He worked as a visiting artist in the North Carolina Community College system for four years, and was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. He was an Arts Administration Fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1990. Founder and director of Durham Cinematheque, he has presented more than sixty unique film programs in downtown Durham since 1991. His short film Conjure Bearden was part of the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2006, and was screened at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 2007. He works as an audiovisual technician in Technical Services at Duke University. 

For more information on the Southern Documentary Fund:
http://southerndocumentaryfund.org/

A Yukon River School
by Melanie Hibbert

What Not to Wear
by Cagla Alkan

(February 29, 2008)

A Yukon River School documents Nulato, an Athabascan village located on the Yukon River in interior Alaska. It is narrated and edited by an outsider, a teacher who lived in the community for two years. Focusing mainly on the school, and the complex relationship it has with the community, this film explores the clash between westernized curriculum and indigenous knowledge. More and more students are choosing to leave home and attend boarding schools, which leaves questions about the future of these rural villages. The project features interviews from Alaska Native elders, teachers, students, and community members; university professors and principals also lend their perspectives. The backdrop for the entire narrative is the spectacular landscape of rural Alaska: the white, lunar snow-scapes; the wide, ribbony Yukon River; and the glowing midnight sun. This is a place few people are ever able to visit.

Chapel Hill native Melanie Hibbert, a graduate of the University of Florida, has a Master’s in Education from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. She is currently teaching creative writing and journalism at a public middle school in Chapel Hill.


In Turkey, wearing an Islamic headscarf is banned from schools, universities, and public offices in an effort to keep the country secular. What Not to Wear is a closer look at the ban by a Turkish woman who doesn’t wear a headscarf. The film follows the stories of four women who wear headscarves and who have been deeply affected by the ban. Fatma, a lawyer in Istanbul, represents 1,200 clients with headscarf complaints; she took their case to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in favor of the ban. Fatma cannot enter the courtrooms in Turkey because she wears a headscarf. Zehra and her friends are university students who wear wigs to hide their headscarves at school. Canan worked as a schoolteacher for sixteen years before she was dismissed from her job because of her headscarf. Ozden is the head of a religious women’s organization that mobilizes women in lower-middle-class neighborhoods of Ankara. The film is a case study on secularism, democracy, and modernization in a Muslim country.

Cagla Alkan is a Durham-based photographer and an aspiring documentary filmmaker. In the summer of 2007 she embarked on her first documentary film, What Not to Wear, working solo for four months in Turkey researching and documenting the effects of the headscarf ban. Born in Izmir, Turkey, in 1979, Alkan studied political science at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia and of UNC–Chapel Hill, where she received her Master’s in Journalism and Master’s in Fine Arts degrees. She currently teaches photography at Elon University in North Carolina and shows her work across the U.S.






Crawford, Texas
by Rebecca MacNeice
(October 26, 2007)

Crawford, Texas is about a few people who have taken a very public stand against the war. Each has a unique story to tell about the consequences of this war. The film creates an intimate portrait of a handful of Americans, of the personal struggles and loss that the anti-war movement currently reflects. The film goes behind the scenes of a tipping point in American history and creates a nuanced understanding of the growing anti-war movement in our country. This film is not another attack on the administration or a mockery of today’s politics. Rather, it is a complex and thoughtful presentation of the perspectives of a few people, putting a human face on the statistics. It provides a “behind the scenes” look at the events that turned regular people, many longtime supporters or members of the military, into peace activists.

Rebecca MacNeice began her television career as an intern for Bill Moyers. Since then, she has focused on technical aspects of the business to enhance her work as a producer and director. Within the last year, her short, cinema verite documentaries have gained a national by-line. Her short films always allow the subjects to speak for themselves – instead of relying on narrative voiceovers. Her most recent work includes shooting for the PBS weekly newsmagazine NOW with David Brancaccio, Logo Television, and a segment for the Human Rights Campaign.

MacNeice is the winner of two Summit Awards for her campaign commercials during the 2004 election cycle, for the now famous Doris “Granny D” Haddock’s campaign. She is a Cine Golden Eagle Awards juror for the documentary competition. She also directed commercials for the 2004 political campaign of Dennis Kucinich for U.S. Congress.





Mountain Top Removal
by Michael Cusack O'Connell
(September 28, 2007)

Mountain Top Removal examines the issues surrounding this form of coal mining, now occurring on a massive scale throughout southern Appalachia. The film chronicles the actions of different groups of citizens working to stop this mining practice, in which entire mountains are leveled to access coal.

Ed Wiley, a resident of Rock Creek, West Virginia, is outraged by the health and environmental hazards posed by a mine located next to Marsh Fork Elementary School, and he joins other locals in the fight to get the school moved out of harm's way.

As summer wears on in the small coal-mining community of Whitesville, West Virginia, Ed decides to walk to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the school. A decision to stop the expansion of the mine next to Marsh Fork Elementary signals a small victory for local citizens in their battle. The politics of West Virginia and the coal industry are deeply intertwined and the final outcome is uncertain.

Along the way the film examines the effects of mountain-top removal through scholars, authors, and citizens who live with it every day.

Michael Cusack O'Connell, producer/director, grew up in Reston, Virginia, and currently resides in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He studied at the College for Recording Arts in San Francisco, California. He has been employed by UNC Television since 1990, first as a soundman and currently as a videographer/editor. His work also includes producing and directing feature series for UNC-TV. O'Connell has received two regional Emmy Awards: the first for his videography work on Watch Me Play, a history of professional women's basketball, and the second for his videography work on AMA-ZONE, a children's program exploring the search for biopharmaceuticals in the Amazon rainforest, produced by PBS affiliate WNEO/WEAO. He was selected twice as a CPB American delegate to the International Public Television Conference (2005, 2007). In 2005 his independent production company, Haw River Films, released the musical-mentary Grassroots Stages, which was distributed nationally on PBS. Mountain Top Removal is the second documentary feature release from Haw River Films.

Nominated for the Spirit Award for Producer of the Year in 1998, executive producer Gill Holland counts among his credits Morgan J. Freeman's unprecedented triple Sundance award-winning Hurricane Streets; the Fox sit-com Greg the Bunny; Desert Blue with Kate Hudson; Spirit Award winner SweetLand with Alan Cumming; Emmy-nominated Dear Jesse, Southern Belles, American Cannibal; AFI winner Bobby G. Can't Swim; Tom Gilroy's Sundance favorite, Spring Forward with Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber; and Tim Kirkman's Loggerheads with Bonnie Hunt. He has produced three volumes of cineBLAST!, as well as short film video compilations featuring Tom Gilroy's Touch Base with Lily Taylor. He has documentaries on water (global privation issues) and Candy Darling under way, and a film starring Adrian Grenier is in post-production. Holland, a half-Norwegian, half-North Carolinian lawyer and former adjunct professor at NYU's Graduate Film School, has also worked at the French Film Office. He has been on the jury for shorts at Sundance and on selection committee for the Academy Awards, Student Division. His record label sonaBLAST! features Kelley McRae, the Old Ceremony, and Irish star Mark Geary.

The August Fresh Docs session will be the final presentations of the Summer 2007 Video Institute
(August 4, 2007)





The June Fresh Docs session will be in conjunction with the graduation ceremony for the Certificate in Documentary Studies, offered by CDS and Duke Continuing Studies
(June 2007)

“I Just Want to Fit into My Jeans”: A Documentary Project on Adolescent Obesity in America
by Meg Daniels and Christine Van Dusan
(May 25, 2007)

An excerpt from "I Just Want to Fit into My Jeans," a photography and writing project:

Every time Sara Gault brought a forkful of spaghetti to her lips, she felt like people were staring, judging, disgusted that the fat girl wouldn’t stop eating. At night, alone in her room, the fifteen-year-old felt similarly sickened when the mirror caught her reflection. To relieve her angst, she pressed thumbtacks into her forearms.

"We’ll never get past that elephant," kids would sneer while trailing Sara in the junior high halls. She kept quiet, wishing to disappear.

That was ninth grade. Now, in tenth grade, Sara says she is different. She wears skirts. She wants to try out for the hip-hop dance team. She promises to go all Taekwondo on anybody who teases her.

All because of Fat Camp.

The month she spent at Camp Timber Creek a co-ed, sleepover wellness camp located on an old boarding-school campus bordered by farmland in North Carolina didn’t entirely reshape her body. But for Sara, and for other campers who go there every summer, camp is no less a transformative experience.

They wear bikinis to the pool, they have boyfriends, they run laps, they perform in talent shows all things that seem inconceivable before camp.

When they go back to the real world, and are surrounded by pinky-thin friends and bombarded with images of skinny starlets, can they stay healthy, in mind and body? Or is that only possible at the place they affectionately call Fat Camp?

We have spent several months getting to know Sara and other teens. We believe that by telling their intimate stories about what happens not just at camp but the struggles, successes, temptations and failures these kids encounter upon returning to the real world we can put a human face on the national epidemic that is childhood obesity.

The percentage of children and teens who are overweight has more than doubled in the past thirty years. Today, about seventeen percent of American kids between the ages of two and nineteen are overweight, according to the National Institutes of Health. The stakes are high.

Meg Daniels grew up in upstate New York, where she received a B.F.A. in photojournalism from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1997. In May 2005, she received an M.S. in adult and community college education from North Carolina State University. She has been a staff photographer for two newspapers, including the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. Daniels is currently working as a full-time freelancer specializing in documentary wedding photography, portraiture, and stock photography. She has taught photography courses at Durham Technical College and the Carrboro Arts Center.

Christine Van Dusen is an award-winning journalist who attended the University of Rochester in New York and completed her master’s degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. During an eleven-year career, her work has appeared in such national publications as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Pink Magazine, and Publisher's Weekly. She has won numerous Associated Press awards and was a finalist for the Livingston Award, which honors excellence by journalists under the age of thirty-five. Her work also has been submitted for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize. She is now an independent writer, editor, and multimedia producer based in Atlanta.




Destroying the Southern Way of Life: The North Carolina Fund Confronts Poverty, 1963–1968
by Rebecca Cerese and Steven Channing
(April 27, 2007)

Destroying the Southern Way of Life: The North Carolina Fund Confronts Poverty, 1963–1968 is a documentary about one of the first, and most innovative, initiatives in the “War on Poverty” during the 1960s. With the creation of the North Carolina Fund, Governor Terry Sanford along with George Esser and the rest of the Fund’s staff and board provided an example of what could be done within communities if they were given the resources to experiment and to look for local economic development opportunities. The lessons presented by the Fund’s triumphs, as well as its defeats, can teach us important lessons about continuing this work today.

Rebecca Cerese is an award-winning filmmaker who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in communications and English. She has worked for Video Dialog Inc. for nine years, producing various videos for nonprofit organizations. Many of these videos document educational reform initiatives in inner-city areas, through such programs as GEAR UP and Project GRAD. Her first documentary, February One, tells the story of the civil rights sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, which served as a catalyst for the nonviolent protests that would follow. February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four had its World Premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2003. The film has also screened at the King Center in Atlanta and the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The film had its national PBS broadcast in February 2005, to mark the 45th anniversary of the sit-ins.

Her new film, Destroying the Southern Way of Life: The North Carolina Fund Confronts Poverty, 1963–1968, continues the work she started in February One by exploring the second phase of the fight for equality, a more subtle fight against economic and educational inequity. Cerese also recently co-authored the commemorative book A Tradition of Excellence: A Pictorial History of the Watts School of Nursing.

Producer Steven Channing, a historian, author, and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, began his professional life as an academic historian, with a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught at the University of Kentucky, Stanford, and Duke and in Genoa, Italy, and he was a research fellow at Johns Hopkins. His published books include the Allen Nevins Prize–winning study Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina, Kentucky: A History in the Bicentennial States and Nation Series, and The Confederate Ordeal for Time-Life’s Civil War series.

Beginning in the 1980s, he began to communicate nonfiction stories about the American past through documentary and educational television. His initial productions include America’s 400th Anniversary, narrated by Andy Griffith, and Loyalty On Trial, which explores Constitutional history and received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award. He then produced Alamance for PBS, a historical drama about the coming of the American Revolution, which won an Emmy Award.

His most recent film project, February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four, premiered at Durham’s acclaimed Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 2003. It had its national broadcast premiere in the PBS series Independent Lens in 2005. Channing is now working with a strong research and production team to produce Durham: A Self-Portrait.

The Silver Rights Movement
by Neil Williams

This Side of the River: Self-Determination and Survival in the Oldest Black Town in America
by Drew Grimes

(March 30, 2007)

The March Fresh Docs screening (at CDS) will be held in conjunction with the North Carolina Folklore Society annual conference.

The Silver Rights Movement explores the legacy of Durham’s Black Wall Street and Hayti district as a backdrop for examining current economic disparities affecting African Americans across the nation. Why has black business ownership lagged? What insight does Durham’s unique business history provide for today’s entrepreneurs? Drawing on original interviews, location filming, scholarly research, and archival records of black entrepreneurship, The Silver Rights Movement is intended to spark debate on the economic history and current conditions of African Americans in this country.

Neil Williams is a 2006 graduate of Duke University, where he majored in public policy with an economics minor and certificate in film. He was a recipient of Duke’s prestigious Benenson Art Award, the Hal Kammerer Video Production Award, and a 2006 Full Frame Fellowship. In 2004 his two-minute film “Super Size Me and Copyright Law” was a finalist in the international Duke Law/Full Frame Moving Image Contest. His production company, CrequeVision Entertainment, has produced shorts for the Black Student Alliance at Duke, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc., and Duke’s Cable 13.


This Side of the River: Self-Determination and Survival in the Oldest Black Town in America incorporates interviews with residents and historians to tell the story of Princeville, North Carolina. Settled by freed slaves in 1865, Princeville was the first town in the United States incorporated by African Americans (1885). The story of Princeville’s survival through racial prejudice, economic hardship, and near-permanent destruction by the flood from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 is an important and previously untold piece of American history. This is a story of African people proudly transforming the discarded land of their captors into a safe haven for resistance and self-expression. Within an ever-changing Southern black identity, the people of Princeville demonstrated communal support through religious, political, and economic self-determination.

Drew Grimes is a trained social-linguist, a documentary filmmaker, and a graphic designer who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is currently working on history museum installations. Ryan Rowe is a trained social-linguist, a documentary filmmaker, and a graphic designer who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is currently working in violence prevention and public education reform.

Yo Tek: A Uganda Tennis
Rex Miller
(February 23, 2007)


Yo Tek: A Uganda Tennis Story follows Patrick Olobo, Uganda’s top-ranked tennis player, as he struggles to leave behind a devastating civil war and break into the ranks of professional tennis.

Patrick was four years old when rebels decimated his family’s farm and murdered his brother. A harrowing childhood, a stint in a miserable camp for the internally displaced, and a stubborn desire to help his dispossessed family have driven Olobo throughout his improbable rise to Davis Cup competition and eventually to the United States, where he continues to train toward a spot on the ATP tour while pursuing a college degree.

“Yo Tek” means “a difficult journey” in Kumam, Olobo’s native dialect, from the Teso Region of northeastern Uganda. Of the fifty-one known dialects in Uganda, Kumam is not widely spoken.

Documentary photographer and filmmaker Rex Miller was educated at Trinity School (1980) and Colgate University (B.A., English/Fine Art, 1984) and took courses in photojournalism at the International Center of Photography in New York. A documentary and editorial photographer for the past eighteen years, he has worked with numerous photography clients, including ABC News, American Express, Atlantic Records, Forbes, John Kennedy, Jr., Mother Jones, Newsweek, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Nickelodeon, Random House, the Robin Hood Foundation, Rolling Stone, Sony Music, and Time. He currently lives and works in Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Rocaterrania
Brett Ingram
(January 31, 2007)

This year’s Fresh Docs schedule kicks off with a screening on the opening night of our Winter 2007 Documentary Happening Institute. We will begin with our traditional happy-hour gathering, Docudropby4fun, at 6:30 p.m., followed by the featured presentation at 7:30 p.m. at the Richard White Auditorium on Duke’s East Campus.

This month’s work in progress is Rocaterrania, a feature-length documentary portrait by award-winning filmmaker Brett Ingram. Rocaterrania, formerly called Renaldo, is a documentary portrait of 75-year-old scientific illustrator and visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler. When the Kuhler family moved from upstate New York to a remote cattle ranch in Colorado in 1948, teenager Renaldo found the isolation unbearable and retreated to the private fantasy world of his notebooks. What began as the illustrated history of an imaginary country called Rocaterrania became Renaldo’s secret lifelong obsession—the sublimated telling of his own life story.

Brett Ingram, formerly an electrical engineer on the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program, exchanged his pocket protector for a movie camera in 1990. His short documentaries and animated films have won thirty awards collectively and have screened at more than 150 festivals and cinema venues internationally.

Ingram’s first documentary feature, Monster Road, won sixteen awards (including “Best Documentary” at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival) and screened at more than eighty festivals and cinema venues internationally before premiering on the Sundance Channel in 2005. Ingram has twice been awarded a Film and Video Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. He teaches filmmaking in the Department of Broadcasting and Cinema at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The Guestworker
Cynthia Hill & Charles Thompson
(November 3, 2006)

This special screening event is sponsored by the Triangle Community Foundation and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, with support from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

With panel discussion led by Andrea Bazán Manson and including Melinda Wiggins, executive director of Student Action with Farmworkers

FILM SYNOPSIS
“I need to go as long as I can work. The only thing is, I don't want to go. I'm old. The work has worn me down and made me tired. My family needs me at home in Mexico, but I need to be here, too.” –Don Candelario Gonzalez Moreno

On a hot, soggy day on a farm in North Carolina, twelve men sit on a porch watching the rain wash away another day's work, another day's wages. One of those men, sixty-six-year-old Candelario, has been coming to the United States for forty years, to harvest our crops as he tries to provide for his family. Without benefits, without retirement, he battles against the elements, his aging body, and the backbreaking work, returning to this farm year after year as “The Guestworker.”

Having spent the last forty years, many illegally, harvesting American crops, Candelario Moreno Gonzales is now enrolled in the U.S. government's H-2A Guestworker Visa Program. The program ensures safe passage but offers no hope of citizenship and the benefits that go along with it.

Filmed on both sides of the border, The Guestworker chronicles the life of this farmworker while looking at the issues surrounding the program from both sides. This film documents the challenges farmworkers face in their struggle to secure a future for their families back home in Mexico and details the pressures on the farmers to produce their crops.

The Guestworker will premiere on PBS in November 2006 as part of Latino Public Broadcasting’s “Voces,” a thirteen-week series on public television stations across the country.

The Guestworker is a fiscally sponsored project of the Southern Documentary Fund and received major support from Latino Public Broadcasting, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Triangle Community Foundation, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

A Beautiful Memory: A Mother and Her Sons Against the Mafia by Anthony Fragola, producer/director
(September 29, 2006)

Brett Ingram facilitated this evening's Fresh Docs session.

This forty-minute documentary is based on an interview with Felicia Impastato, whose son was killed by the Mafia in Sicily twenty-six years ago because of his relentless and open struggle to break its control of civil society. What is eventful in this film is that Peppino’s father was a mafioso, and it was the first time a mafia son openly rebelled against his father. In addition, Felicia Impastato was one of the first women to openly speak out against the Mafia and to bring civil suit to bring justice to her son. The authorities, perhaps in collusion with the Mafia, tried to make it appear that his death was a failed suicide terrorist attack.

Anthony Fragola is Professor of Broadcasting and Cinema at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He co-authored, along with Roch C. Smith, The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films, published by the University of Southern Illinois Press. His collection of short stories, Feast of the Dead, based on Italian American themes, was published by Guernica Press and then translated and published in Italy by Coppola Editore. His stories have been published in literary magazines both here and abroad, and his short films and videos have been shown in film festivals, colleges, and universities. He has published critical essay on literature and film. His video, Feast of the Dead, is both a personal journey back to Sicily and a study of the ritual of honoring past relatives on All Souls’ Day. He has completed a translation of a collection of interviews with Sicilian women titled Sicilian Women: True Stories of Conviction and Courage. Fragola is currently editing a video interview with Felicia Impastato, one of the women featured in the collection. The film, I Cento Passi, is based on the life of her son, Giovanni Impastato, who was murdered by the Mafia.

Brett Ingram (MFA), an Assistant Professor in the Department of Broadcasting and Cinema at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in the summer of 2003. Ingram was also an instructor in the 2005 and 2006 Summer Video Institutes at CDS.

The Fullness of Time by Andrew Beck Grace
(May 25, 2006)

The Fullness of Time is the pilot episode of a new documentary series titled “The Living South,” produced by the Center for Public Television & Radio at the University of Alabama. The series focuses on a wide variety of both historical and contemporary stories from throughout the Deep South told with first-person narrators and a unique visual style.

The Fullness of Time is the first-person account of Theresa Burroughs, a foot soldier on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. Born and raised in Greensboro, Alabama, Theresa was in her late teens when the Montgomery bus boycotts began to take shape. Soon she found herself immersed in the movement – attending every meeting and march within driving distance. The film offers her account of that time and her reflections on the rural origins of the Civil Rights Movement. She relates stories of jails, of marches, of fire hoses, and finally, of a visit by Dr. Martin Luther King just three weeks before his death. Now, Theresa operates a small museum in her former residence. The Safe House Museum offers visitors access to relics of the Civil Rights Movement as well as stories from someone who lived the history.

Andrew Beck Grace is a producer/director at the Center for Public Television & Radio at the University of Alabama. With a background in American studies, his chosen vehicles for storytelling are film and radio. Born and raised in Alabama, he has recently returned home (and to his alma mater) to pursue stories about the South. His films have appeared on Current TV and Wyoming Public Television, while his radio work has played on local public radio affiliates and on National Public Radio.

Two video projects with a peace activist theme
(April 28, 2006)

My Autobiography in Scripture: Thelma Chandler Moorhead
By Meggan Moorhead, filmmaker and project director

Untitled Project (About Fayetteville Anti-War Demo, March 2005)
By Red Clay Productions (Nego Crosson and Isabell Moore)


• My Autobiography in Scripture: Thelma Chandler Moorhead
By Meggan Moorhead, filmmaker and project director

Thelma Chandler Moorhead lived the Scripture—Love your enemy—as she arrived in Japan during the American occupation after World War II. The Southern Baptist Convention questioned her commitment to serve the enemy rather than go to China. In this documentary she tells her story of pacifism and feminism. She speaks with fire and humor, humility and certainty.

Thelma is an example of a Southern girl, born into poverty and family tragedy, who heard God speaking directly to her. With absolutely nothing but faith and trust, she walked the way of her calling, a woman who exemplifies the spiritual life of the white South in the 1920s and 1930s and its drumbeat call to missions. Thelma is not alone, but is one of thousands of missionary women who expressed their spiritual life by working in foreign countries. She was neither awarded nor rewarded in any extraordinary way.

The filmmaker and project director is Moorhead’s daughter, Meggan Moorhead, Ed.D., a psychologist in practice in Durham, North Carolina.



• Untitled Project (About Fayetteville Anti-War Demo, March 2005)
By Red Clay Productions (Nego Crosson and Isabell Moore)

What do a military wife living on Ft. Bragg, a queer drag king who is an Air Force veteran, and a National Guard veteran whose son deserted the Navy all have in common? All of them live in North Carolina, are part of the anti-war movement, and are featured in a documentary being made by Greensboro film company Red Clay Productions.

On March 19, 2005, close to five thousand people from North Carolina and across the country demonstrated against the Iraq War in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Ft. Bragg. This protest dwarfed the famous 1971 Fayetteville anti-Vietnam march featuring Jane Fonda.

Nego Crosson has lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, for more than twelve years and is a committed anti-racism activist with extensive experience both supporting families who have lost loved ones to police brutality and fighting for global economic justice. She is a founder and editor of Copwatch newspaper and has been an NC Indymedia journalist for the past five years. She is currently a volunteer with the Urban Literature Film Festival and a producer at Greensboro Community Television (GCTV). She recently finished a short documentary on Greensboro activists’ participation in protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.

Isabell Moore grew up in Greensboro and returned to live there two years ago, after living and studying for six years in New York, where she was involved in fighting for protection of community gardens and opposing corporate globalization. In Greensboro, she is active in economic and racial justice issues, as well as fighting war and police brutality. She has written for NC Indymedia, Copwatch, and Urban Literature Film Festival Magazine, and is currently a researcher for a Displaced Films documentary on GI war resisters during Vietnam. She is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

Over the Farm: A New Deal Resettlement and Its Legacy
A Film by Chris Potter and Charlie Thompson, Narrated by Gary Grant
(March 31, 2006)

Landless African American sharecroppers found hope in a U.S. government land resettlement program that offered them a chance to buy their “forty acres and a mule” in the 1930s. They moved to their own plots of land in Tillery, North Carolina, by the hundreds. Over the past seventy years, while battling racism, natural disasters, and economic pressures, the community members have struggled to hang on to their land and their history despite the forces working against them. Many moved North in search of jobs. Most of their farms have failed. Will the dream of land and the power of self-determination that comes with it stay alive for the next generation? Though powerful entities work against them, at the resettlement residents sing “I Shall Not Be Moved.”

Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT), a community group whose members are descendants of the resettlers, collaborated on this film. As explained on its Web site, CCT is a community-based organization whose purpose is to promote and improve the social, economic, and educational welfare of the citizens in the surrounding community through the self-development of its members. CCT seeks to achieve its mission by providing information, conducting educational activities, participating in voter registration and voter educational efforts, promoting leadership, and teaching organizational skills. CCT also provides such necessary services as transportation and health care, workshops on issues such as land ownership and debt control, and programs on African American culture and heritage. CCT gives direction and support to various member organizations that have or will become part of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery. For more information about CCT, see: http://members.aol.com/tillery/

Gary Grant is executive director of Concerned Citizens of Tillery. A student activist at North Carolina Central University (the first African American to integrate the Carolina Theater main floor, for example), he returned to Tillery to work with his parents to save their farm and helped found Concerned Citizens of Tillery, which he has directed for more than twenty years. He is a consultant for and main narrator of the film. Grant and other Tillery residents will be on hand for this screening to answer questions and to engage in dialogue about their community and the film.

Charlie Thompson (co-producer/director) is curriculum and education director at the Center for Documentary Studies and adjunct professor of cultural anthropology and religion at Duke University. He is co-producer/director with Cynthia Hill of The Guestworker, a film recently selected for national distribution by the Latino Public Broadcasting Service. His latest book is titled The Old German Baptist Brethren: Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge (University of Illinois Press, spring 2006).

Chris Potter (co-producer/director) is an independent film producer and graphic designer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has produced films for a variety of corporations and educational institutions over the past thirty years, including the Atlantic Coast Conference. Potter works in a range of media, from graphic design to computer-based presentations to commercial and documentary videos. After studying video and film production at the Rice University Media Center, he received an M.Ed. in instructional design from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He launched Southern Media Design & Production in 1976 and has been involved in projects for businesses large and small, institutions, and individuals ever since. He teaches documentary video production at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Photography Presentations: Kathie Florsheim and Rebekah Ann Meek
(February 24, 2006)

The series “On the Edge,” by Kathie Florsheim, is a documentary project that explores the intersection between the man-made and natural environment of the coast, especially the seasonal use of the land, coastal access, and conflicting land-use interests, such as development and open space needed for natural habitat. Florsheim works with a medium-format camera; the prints for the series are 16-by-20-inches, printed as traditional C-41 images. She is currently photographing along the coast in Rhode Island, where she lives; in coastal Maine; and along the tip of Cape Cod. Her intention is to make subversively beautiful images of a disturbed and disturbing landscape in order to draw the viewer into engagement with the issues.

Kathie Florsheim was trained as a fine arts photographer, and has gradually become a documentarian. She admires the work of photojournalists, who often function under less-than-ideal working conditions yet manage to make cogent, often graceful images. Florsheim lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.


Photographer Rebekah Meek’s work focuses on Lovigahawaththa, a small fishing village on the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, which was devastated by the tsunami of December 2004. Seventy-two of 220 community members perished, and only 3 of 55 houses were left standing. What wasn’t washed away was the villagers’ hope, their strength, and their determination to go on. “Apekshawa” is a work-in-progress about the lives of these community members since the tsunami.

Rebekah Ann Meek is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and activist from Carrboro, North Carolina. She recently graduated from Meredith College, where she studied graphic design with a specific interest in representation of women in mass media. Her most recent body of work is focused on Lovigahawaththa, a fishing village in Sri Lanka. She works at Footpath Pictures and is pursuing a long-term documentary project in Southeast Asia focusing on women and domestic worker’s rights.

The Return of Ollie and the GoGos: A Rockumentary directed by Diane Bloom and Doug Frederick
(January 27, 2006)

High school rock bands come and go, and most are never heard from again. But Ollie and the GoGos, a 1967 high school rock band from a small town in northern Pennsylvania, came back after thirty-seven years to play one last time in the same high school gym where it all began. For most of these former rockers, their high school band experience was THE highlight of their lives. Can they recapture the magic?

Diane Bloom, co-director of The Return of Ollie and the GoGos, is a qualitative researcher and filmmaker from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is the producer and director of Squirrel Wars, a film that documents the lengths that otherwise sane people will go to as they do battle with the squirrels that invade their bird feeders. She is also director and producer of An Unlikely Friendship, about the altogether surprising friendship that developed between a leader of the KKK and a black woman active in civil rights causes. An Unlikely Friendship has been the recipient of five awards and is currently airing on national public television.

Doug Frederick, co-director of The Return of Ollie and the GoGos, is a professor at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh. This is his first film. He is, however, already in the process of making another film, about his experiences living in southern Chile.

Davis Stillson, the executive producer and editor of The Return of Ollie and the GoGos, has had a career as a video editor at UNC in Chapel Hill. He has worked on many films and video pieces, including An Unlikely Friendship.





Farmworker Documentary Project by Carmela Meehan and
Time Capsule Project in Montenero, Italy by John Caserta
(November 18, 2005)

Farmworker Documentary Project
As an intern for Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), Carmela Meehan set out this summer to document SAF interns’ diverse experiences while they worked at health clinics, helped out at legal aid agencies, or taught English classes with farmworkers.

Since the internship program ended, Carmela has turned her lens to making portraits of farmworkers themselves. The goal of these photographs is not to show the hardships that farmworkers face. Rather than victimize them, which she believes the mainstream media generally does, the goal is to humanize them. Carmela wants to remind the public that their food is brought to them not only by the people who manage grocery stores and food distribution, but first by those who harvest it from the earth.

Growing up in Northern California, Carmela Meehan, currently a student at UC-Santa Cruz, became increasingly interested in the enormous agriculture fields that blanket the sprawling landscape. She began to photograph the employees and the environment of a particular farm where she worked in Davenport, California. She plans to continue photographing this farm when she finishes her internship with SAF and finishes her bachelor’s degree.


Time Capsule Project in Montenero, Italy
This project, still untitled, is a time capsule documenting the end of centuries-old traditions of a small southern Italian village, Montenero Val Cocchiara. John Caserta approached the fieldwork much like the first time capsule in 1939: by collecting objects (photos, tools, documents, etc.), stories, and diagrams that illustrated contemporary and past life for future generations. The year-long gathering period ended in August 2005 with both materials donated by residents for use in the capsule and his observations, video footage, interviews, photographs, and projects.

The editing and design process is now underway. Caserta is preparing the material in a print format with a copy to be left in the Montenero library and for online distribution at montenerovillage.it.

John Caserta is a Providence-based artist specializing in graphic design and photography. His projects are medium non-specific, but tend toward books and online presentations. For the last year, he was a Fulbright Fellow creating and gathering media for a time capsule about a small Italian village.






Two Forms of ID: How My Brother Became My Sister produced and directed by Diana Newton
Lebanese Americans, a documentary photography project by Amy Joseph
(October 28, 2005)


Two Forms of ID
In Two Forms of ID: How My Brother Became My Sister, Diana Newton examines how her brother’s change in gender identity tests the “ties that bind” in a Southern family. This deeply personal film not only follows the transformation of Christopher into Christine, but also looks at the family’s experience of loss, grief, and adaptation in response to this dramatic change. Told by Newton, the story will challenge beliefs about gender differences, family secrets, and the complexities of love.

Over the past two years, Newton has taken numerous courses at the Center for Documentary Studies to further develop her understanding of conceptual, technical, and business aspects of the filmmaking process. Her film Two Forms of ID has been accepted for fiscal sponsorship by the Southern Documentary Fund.

Newton’s current media development work also includes serving as co-producer and writer of a documentary work-in-progress, Making Connections: The Life and Legacy of Virginia Satir. She is writing a business history of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and will produce a supporting short documentary film about the company’s development.


Lebanese Americans
“My dad’s parents emigrated from Lebanon in the 1920s. My Sitto (my grandmother) left in 1928, when she was 19, and my Giddo (my grandfather) left in 1920, when he was 21. They had known each other in Lebanon, and when my Sitto arrived in Niagara Falls, my Giddo was already there. They were married and had four sons: Joe, Eli, Rich, and Bobby. Rich is my dad, and he has raised me with a pride and an awareness about being Lebanese.

“This is a photography project focusing on the younger generations of my family. It has been wonderful to be able to spend time with my family and photograph and explore my heritage. This is also the base of a broader project about people from throughout the Middle East.”

Amy Joseph is a photographer based in Carrboro, North Carolina. In 2003 she completed the continuing studies Certificate in Documentary Studies at CDS. For her final project, she photographed at SeeSaw Studio, an after-school program for Durham high school students learning about design and business. Joseph graduated from James Madison University in 1999 with a major in Media Arts and Design. She has also studied at the International Center of Photography in New York City and the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine. Her photographs have been exhibited in Carrboro, Chapel Hill, and Durham, North Carolina, and in Norfolk, Virginia.

Madison County Project produced by Martha King and Rob Roberts
(September 30, 2005)

Madison County Project examines the ballad-singing tradition in Madison County, North Carolina, and how the work of documentary filmmakers and photographers has impacted that tradition. The film unfolds through the songs and stories of current singers, such as Sheila Kay Adams and the descendants of Dellie Chandler Norton, as well as through the works of John Cohen, Rob Amberg, and Harvey Wang.

Martha King is a graduate student in the Curriculum in Folklore at UNC–Chapel Hill. Hailing from the mountains of North Carolina, she has a strong interest in documenting the intersections of music and culture in the South. She is currently writing her master's thesis on the community presented in Madison County Project and the experience of making the movie.

Rob Roberts is a graduate student in the Journalism Program at UNC–Chapel Hill and works as a video production specialist at the Institute for Science Learning. Originally from western Virginia, he worked as a public affairs officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and as a producer with Davenport Films and the Folkstreams project before returning to school.

Carrying on Our Traditions and Celebrations: Hispanics in North Carolina by Luis Velasco and Good. Grief. by Ava Johnson
(July 29, 2005)

Carrying on Our Traditions and Celebrations: Hispanics in North Carolina
The face of the new South includes many new traditions and beliefs from cultures outside the region. Many of these traditions and celebrations are improvised, according to the materials and resources that are available. These traditions are rites of passage or cultural traditions that will be passed down from one generation to the next. This body of work looks to explore, demystify, and answer questions of the importance and significance about celebrations in Hispanic culture.

Luis-Rey Velasco is the Darkroom Manager at the Center for Documentary Studies. He has completed substantial documentary projects on farmworkers in California's central San Joaquin Valley and in Stovall, North Carolina. He recently started work on a new project documenting quinceañera celebrations in Mexican American and farmworker families. His work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Levine Museum of the New South; he also curated Recollections from Home, a traveling exhibition of the Durham-based organization Student Action with Farmworkers.


Good. Grief.
"My apartment caught on fire in May of last year. In that fire I lost my dog and countless other irreplaceable treasures. I found myself in a depression trying to deal with this incredible sense of hopelessness and loss. The only thing that barely scratches the surface of this kind of feeling was dealing with the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election."—Ava Johnson

In this new body of work, Johnson uses personal narrative as a way to expand the perimeter of traditional documentary work. With Good. Grief. she investigates what grieving looks like.

A native of North Carolina, Ava Johnson is an activist, artist, and performer. She received her BFA in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently the Public Information Coordinator at the Center for Documentary Studies. Her body of work includes photographs, video, and performance that explore her own identity and visibility as a queer woman of color.

Photographs by Jaman Matthews
(June 24, 2005)

This on-going project consists of three related segments: formal portraits of families and individuals at a local AME Zion church; Matthews's own, more candid photographs of church members; and photographs made by youth.

Matthews is originally from Mississippi, where he worked as, among many other things, a middle-school teacher, farm manager, and cotton scout. He moved to North Carolina two years ago and began taking classes at the Center for Documentary Studies. He is currently a graduate student in the Curriculum in Folklore at UNC-Chapel Hill. His primary area of interest is the American South, with a focus on religion and, having been brought up in a farming family, agriculture and land use. Previous projects include photographing handmade and found-object grave markers and documenting his family's farm in Mississippi as it transitioned from row crops to trees for pulp and timber. The present photographs are part of a larger ethnographic endeavor with a local AME Zion church that was made possible in part by a grant for the Center for the Study of the American South.






"From Spec to Check" by Shea Shackelford and Jennifer Deer
"Podcasting: The New Audio Frontier" by Shea Shackelford
(May 27, 2005)

In honor of this week's CDS advanced audio institute, Hearing Is Believing: Making It Sing, Fresh Docs will present two audio artists, Jennifer Dear and Shea Shackelford, who will present individual and collaborative work.

"From Spec to Check"
Last month, audio producers Shea Shackelford and Jennifer Deer went down to the National Cornbread Festival in south Tennessee and had a blast! And then they looked for a way to get paid for it. Five hours of tape, three weeks of phone calls to producers, and many hours of long-distance editing resulted in a three-minute audio postcard on NPR's Day to Day.

"Podcasting: The New Audio Frontier"
Shea Shackelford is developing audio projects for a new, democratic documentary-delivery device.  He'll share some work-in-progress from his efforts to start up a weekly Internet documentary broadcast and give an overview of Podcasting: what it is, what content is out there, and why it's an important opportunity for documentary audio. Shea is developing a new Podcast feed (Internet show) called Radio Pie, and he'll talk about his goals for his new program and his audio work.

Jennifer Deer is a freelance producer living in Durham. Her work for radio has been heard on such national programs as NPR's Day to Day and on Weekend America, as well as on WUNC in North Carolina, on WABE in Atlanta, and on Georgia Public Radio. In 2001, she helped to originate "ArtVoice," a weekly arts magazine for WABE-FM public radio in Atlanta. She also hosted and co-produced the program.

Shea Shackelford is a freelance producer living in Washington, DC. Born and raised in the Tennessee Valley, Shea spent the first thirty years of his life moving around the country and working as a "professional do-gooder." After a few years of experimenting with audio documentaries, he finally succumbed to his love of people, stories, and audio; abandoned his job; and attended the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in the fall of 2004. Since then, he's been enjoying the mystery and anxiety of charting a new career.

Millworker by Linda Booker
Invisible States by Erin Comerford and Frank Eaton
(April 29, 2005)


Millworker
Linda Booker

One night in November 2003, a community college theater company set up a stage in an old and empty mill building in Pittsboro, North Carolina. They told the story of Depression-era textile workers through oral history dialogues and folk music. What was intended to be a one-time performance turned into a yearlong odyssey that changed the lives of the cast and won the hearts of critics and audiences across the state. Millworker is a documentary film that explores how a grassroots theater production came together and connected its actors and community to their past.

Linda Booker will be completing the Certificate in Documentary Studies program, offered by CDS in conjunction with Duke Continuing Studies, in June. A graduate of Florida State University, she has been a graphic designer and art director for numerous publications in Florida and North Carolina. Since moving to Pittsboro eight years ago, she has become involved with several nonprofit organizations, and in 2001 received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service.


Invisible States
Erin Comerford and Frank Eaton

Documenting the quirky and contentious trajectory of a North Carolina artist collective's veggie-oil–powered bus tour of the United States, Invisible States is an almost impossibly intimate portrait of young artists and the collective urge. If you’ve ever wanted to buy a big house and fill it with all your favorite people, this film is both inspiration and cautionary tale. With music by Psychic Revolution.

Producer Erin Comerford discovered her love of the documentary form in projects she made at the Center for Documentary Studies as a Duke undergraduate (Trinity '04). She has also shot and directed a feature (tentatively titled Home and Hood) that documents an innovative arts apprenticeship program for at-risk youth in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Director, executive producer, and cinematographer Frank Eaton teaches video production to at-risk youth in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he grew up.

King of Punk by Kenneth van Schooten
Lab-ing by Michelle Faucher
(March 16, 2005)

King of Punk
Kenneth van Schooten

This documentary includes interviews with Marky Ramone, Jayne County, Stiff Little Fingers, Cheetah Chrome, Penelope Houston, Robert Lopez (aka El Vez), Exploitedís Wattie Buchan, and other artists who were involved in the Punk scene from 1976 to 1982. They talk about the past, present, and future of this music form and the music industry in general.

The interviews are edited around the story of a five-piece, all-girl band called OBGYN from Fayetteville, North Carolina. OBGYN started playing Punk because it was "fun and easy," but with no any intentions of doing much with their music. As their popularity grew they decided to release a CD, which attracted attention from the local press and booking agents. The girls talk about what it's like to grow up in a small, military town and about their hopes and dreams for the band and their future. Throughout the film, narrator Joey Keithley of DOA recites from his best-selling book, I, Shithead, an autobiography from this Canadian Punk pioneer.

Kenneth van Schooten is originally from the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States, with his wife, three years ago. In his native country, he worked as a sound man for the NOS Journal, the main Dutch news program. He has worked as a videographer on a documentary about the rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef and The Late Risers Club, a documentary about the long-running college radio show at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Lab-ing
Michelle Faucher

Santa Fe, New Mexico, where alternative paths to self-improvement and personal growth are commonplace, is home to a group of people who are exploring of the influence of language patterns on our subjective experience of the world. Experimenting with minor modifications to spoken English in a setting called a "Lab," they report both personal perceptual shifts and shifts in interpersonal interactions. Among the most common linguistic transformations are the use of only present tense, of primarily reflexive verbs, and of the construct "in me" to reflect an internalization of external events, things, and people. Instead of saying, "I am attending a lab," they might say, "I am lab-ing myself." This film follows a number of lab participants as they conduct their personal growth experiments.

Michelle Faucher has been a student in the CDS Continuing Studies certificate program since April 2004. She holds a BA and an MA from St. John's College. Her interest in documentary work is primarily in the personal narrative form. Interested in teaching documentary production as a means to greater media literacy, she recently completed a ten-year career in business management and is pleased to be a part of the CDS learning community. Her permanent home is in Santa Fe, New Mexico.





“Work in Progress” by Alejandro Toma
Mom’s Story Dad Remembers by Victor Friedman
(February 16, 2005)


Alejandro Tomas, a former Navy combat cameraman and a member of the White House press corps, has photographed nationally and internationally for Time, Newsweek, Forbes, and other magazines. Currently, Tomas is director of the Commercial Photography Program at Seattle Central Community College. He has thirty-two years of experience in professional photography and is co-founder of the Youth in Focus Project in Seattle, Washington.


Mom’s Story Dad Remembers by Victor Friedman
“My parents never talked about the enormous crimes that were perpetrated against them and their families during WWII in what is now Croatia. In preparing a dedication when my Mom passed away recently, I found myself embarrassingly ignorant of her history. Through research and dialogue this video tells the heart-wrenching story of what happened to two young Jews caught in events over which they had no control. It is a story of a man and a woman who survived incredible odds, lost their entire extended families and properties, and managed through sheer survival instincts to build a new life in America.”

Victor Friedman was born in Bari, Italy, in 1944, of Yugoslavian war refugees and immigrated to Denver, Colorado, in 1956. During Friedman’s high school years his father, an experienced photographer, removed the many mysteries of photography and set him in on his way to becoming an accomplished amateur photographer. After Friedman graduated from Harvard (1967) in applied physics and MIT (1970) with an M.S. in signal processing, he first worked at the Raytheon Advanced Development Laboratory in Massachusetts, then switched careers to geophysics and went to work for the Shell Oil Company in New Orleans. In 1974, he began a twenty-year career as a geophysicist with Aramco, first in London and then in Saudi Arabia. During this foreign assignment he honed his photographic skills in travel photography all over the world. His slide library approaches 10,000 images.





El Quinceaños by Hilda B. Quintanar
“PSA to Prevent Driving While Intoxicated” by Hilda B. Quintanar and Tana Hoffman
Gigantes en los Campos by Erika Simon
(December 15, 2004)

NOTE: An interpreter will translate between Spanish and English during the introduction and Q&A session so that all may participate.

El Quinceaños, by Hilda B. Quintanar, is about the important Hispanic tradition of a girl becoming a young woman upon turning fifteen years old, when she is presented to society by her parents. At this traditional Mexican ceremony, attended by all of her family and friends, she dances the waltz with her father and her young male attendants.

The narration in “Public Service Announcement to Prevent Driving While Intoxicated” (one minute) is from a documentary interview. It will air this holiday season on Univision, the Spanish-language cable television station. The PSA was made possible by the Durham Merchants Association Foundation, the Duke Giving Project, and Capitol Broadcasting Company. Directed and produced by Hilda B. Quintanar and Tana Hoffman; edited by Erika Simon and Hilda B. Quintanar.

Gigantes en los Campos (“Giants in the Fields”) is the title of a short play that was performed this summer at six different migrant farm-labor camps in North Carolina to the farmworkers who lived there. The play is a comic depiction of some of the problems farmworkers face under the H2A contracts that bring them legally from Mexico to work in the United States with often-unfulfilled and unknown rights and benefits. The actors—summer 2004 interns for Durham-based Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF)—are the stars of this short documentary by Erika Simon, which takes a look behind the scenes of putting on the play. The purpose of the video is to promote SAF and recruit new interns, and to encourage people to use protest theater and other creative means of gaining farmworker participation in the movement. Please visit the SAF Web site: www.saf-unite.org. Made possible by a grant from the Southern Partners Fund.

Hilda B. Quintanar is from Mexico City. She currently lives in Durham with her husband, Manuel, and her son, Norberto. Last fall she, along with seven other Latina women, took a course on using a video camera for documentaries with Nancy Kalow at the Center for Documentary Studies. She also shot the footage and assisted with interviews for the SAF video documentary this summer.

Erika Simon has been studying at the Center for Documentary Studies since 2002. She was an editor for Carlyle Poteat and David Kasper’s Gatewood: Facing the White Canvas, released this fall, and has taught editing at CDS since fall 2003, including at “Show Me What Democracy Looks Like,” the CDS Video Institute this past summer. When she is not editing, tutoring in Final Cut Pro, or procrastinating, she works at The Sun Magazine. She’s currently making small strides toward her goal of walking 10,000 steps per day, according to her pedometer.

En Español:
El Quinceaños trata acerca de algo muy importante en la cultura hispana: cuando una niña pasa a ser una señorita al cumplir 15 años y es presentada ante la sociedad por sus padres. Baila el Vals con su papá y sus chambelanes, acompañada por sus familiares y amigos. Es algo muy tradicional en México. De Hilda B. Quintanar.

El narración en Anuncio de Servicio Público sobre No Manejar Borracho (de un minuto) es de un entrevista documental. Se está pasando actualmente en el canal en español de cable Univisón durante la temporada navideña. El anuncio se hizo con fondos del The Durham Merchants Association Foundation, The Duke Giving Project, and the Capitol Broadcasting Company. Hilda B. Quintanar dirigió y produjo junto con Tana Hoffman, y editó con Erika Simon.

Gigantes en los Campos es el título de una obra de teatro corta que está basada en la vida real de trabajadores del campo que entrevistaron aprendices de SAF (Student Action for Farmworkers). Se trata de algunos de los problemas que tienen los trabajadores que vienen a trabajar legalmente a los Estados Unidos con visas H2A. Los trabajadores frecuentemente no reciben o no saben de múltiples derechos y beneficios que tienen con dichas visas. Los actores de la obra (que son los aprendices de SAF del 2004) son las estrellas de este documental corto. El documental muestra el proceso de presentar la obra de teatro. El propósito de este video es promover SAF y reclutar nuevos aprendices. También tiene como meta fomentar el uso de obras de teatro como forma de protesta y el uso de otras formas creativas para involucrar a trabajadores agrícolas en la lucha por sus derechos. Por favor visite su sitio de internet: www.saf-unite.org. El video se hizo con fondos del Southern Partners Fund. De Erika Simon.

Hilda B. Quintanar es de la ciudad de México. Ahora vive en Durham con su esposo Manuel y su hijo Norberto. Ella y 7 otras mujeres Latinas tomaron un curso de cómo utilizar una cámara de video para documentales con Nancy Kalow en el Centro de Documentales el otoño pasado. Hilda grabó y ayudó con entrevistas para el video documental de SAF este verano.

Erika Simon ha estudiado en el Centro de Estudios Documentales desde el 2002. Ella fue una de los editores para el documental Gatewood: Facing the White Canvas de Carlyle Poteat y David Kasper que salió este otoño. Ha enseñado edición en el CDS desde otoño del 2003 y enseñó para el Instituto de Videos de CDS este verano. Cuando no está editando, dando clases particulares de Final Cut Pro, trabaja en la revista The Sun Magazine. Según su podómetro está logrando poco a poco su meta de caminar 10,000 pasos por día.





Outrunning History: A Document of Survival, with Jesse Andrews
Photographs and Creative Nonfiction/Oral History
(June 16, 2004)

"Since 1983 I have photographed my father, a disabled veteran from WWII, documenting his home life as well as his interaction with the Office of Veteran's Affairs.  In 2002 Charlie Thompson of the Center for Documentary Studies conducted oral histories with both my father and my mother. My father shared details of his early life as well as his war experiences, providing a wealth of information he had not previously felt comfortable discussing. By combining my own images and older photographs provided by my parents with the oral histories, I was able to tell the story of one man's survival in spite of the overwhelming odds he faced."

Jesse Andrews
Photographer, teacher, and writer Jesse Andrews is currently traveling Thirteen-Month Crop, an exhibition about tobacco farmers from a project funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, under the auspices of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His work is being archived with the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. He has been exhibiting his work since1979 in both group and solo shows, and his work has appeared in DoubleTake magazine. His photographs can currently be seen in the International Center of Photography exhibition Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self.





Work in Progress: Short Video, with Sandra Jacobi
The Heart of Dr. Joseph Kramer (working title), with Amy Williams
(May 12, 2004)

Work In Progress: Short Video
Sandra Jacobi will be presenting a short work in progress that is the story of how documentary videos are overrunning her life, as evidenced by the crazy nightmares and the energy she finds in the world of images.

Sandra Jacobi
Sandra Jacobi began studying video and film production in 1997. She has a special interest in documentary work that explores the satisfaction and sustaining energy that people find in their lives, either at work or otherwise. Her work has been screened in Durham, at the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival (now called the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival) as well as at the Documentary Film and Video Happening at the Center for Documentary Studies, and in Seattle and Chicago. Her video productions have earned ITVA, Videographer, Telly, Communicator, and CINE Awards.

The Heart of Dr. Joseph Kramer (working title)
Dr. Joseph Kramer left a lucrative private practice in the New Jersey suburbs to set up shop in Alphabet City in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In a neighborhood plagued by poverty and violence, Dr. Kramer was a psychiatrist, pediatrician, addiction specialist, fierce advocate for family planning, and obstetrician, sometimes treating three generations of families caught in the cycle of teen pregnancy. Joelle Morrison was Dr. Kramer’s first secretary when he moved into his office on the Lower East Side. Drawing on her life-long relationship with Dr. Kramer, Amy Morrison Williams (Joelle’s daughter) combines archival footage and recent interviews to create a compelling portrait of a seventy-nine-year-old man who struggles with his legacy and his deep anger that basic medical care is still out of reach for the poorest children in our rich nation.

Amy Morrison Williams
Raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Amy Morrison Williams, 36, has been a lifelong fan of film. She recently earned a Certificate in Documentary Studies from the Center for Documentary Studies and Duke Continuing Studies. In conjunction with her work in that program, Morrison Williams, a natural storyteller, has reached her first goal: completion of The Morrison Project, a documentary film based on her family’s struggles and triumphs following the attempted murder of her father. The Morrison Project won the Golden Starfish Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival.





Devoted: Portraits of Belief
with Abigail Seymour (April 21, 2004)

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to worship freely. And yet, second only to racial bias, say FBI statistics, religious bias is the top motivation for hate crimes in America.

The Encyclopedia of American Religions counts 1,584 different religious organizations in the United States. There are, by some counts, 17 denominations within Christianity alone, from Southern Baptists to Russian Orthodoxy, from Scandinavian Pietism to Roman Catholicism. But Christians, while a large percentage of the population, are by no means the only members of the devout. There are millions of Muslims and Jews; there are Buddhists, snake-handlers, Wiccans, neopaganists, Santerians, Hindus, Baha’is, Amish, Quakers, Native American Spiritualists, Scientologists. All are people of faith.

In this powerful collection of photographs and audio interviews, Abigail Seymour shows how people in the United States express one of their most cherished freedoms: religious expression. Devoted honors Americans of a variety of different ethical systems by letting them speak in their own words about what they believe.

Abigail Seymour
Abigail Seymour’s photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Time Out NY, Billboard, Mojo, Book, Attaché, Atlanta, and The Sun. Her photo-essay about the construction of a memorial gate to be made out of beams from the wreckage of the World Trade Center appears in the book The American Spirit: Meeting the Challenge of September 11, recently published by the editors of LIFE.

For three years Seymour lived in Madrid, Spain, during which time she walked El Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage road across the north of Spain. Her written narrative of the experience was published in Traveler’s Tales: Women’s Best Spiritual Travel Writing.

A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Seymour has studied and lived in France, Egypt, Italy, and Spain. She traveled to Cuba last winter courtesy of an Emerging Artist grant from the North Carolina Arts Council. In the summer of 2002 she studied with National Geographic photographer Joe McNally at the Maine Photographic Workshops, and she is currently at work on a series of photographs of a family in Del Rio, Tennessee, for the Appalachia Service Project. Seymour lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and their three dogs.




Reverence with Clay: Crystal King Pottery
with Mary Dalton (March 17, 2004)

Crystal King, of Seagrove, North Carolina, is a third-generation folk artist who grew up working in the pottery tradition of the region. A young woman who was recognized in her early teens by collectors, she is best known for her sculptural pieces of Biblical scenes, such as Adam and Eve at the apple tree, Jonah and the big fish, and Moses and the burning bush; perhaps most famous are her versions of Noah and the ark. This film captures the essence of her work process, her interaction with people who collect her work, and her thoughts about the Seagrove tradition, which she believes is being lost despite the influx of potters in the past fifteen years and the opening of their many new potteries.




Cemetery
with Wilson Weldon III (February 18, 2004)

This short documentary is an exposition of one man and his current passion. Nat Walker, a contractor and self-described jack-of-all-trades, roughly sixty years old, appointed himself the caretaker, groundskeeper, and restorer of the Thomasville (N.C.) City Cemetery in the mid-1990s, initially with no pay or encouragement. Subsequently, Walker has been hired by the City of Thomasville in an official position. In casual conversations, Walker is quick to invoke God’s will that this work be done by him. The history of City Cemetery is significant in that Union and Confederate soldiers are buried in the same section of the cemetery. The film unravels, in under twenty minutes, the character, appeal, and altruism of Nat Walker in the current local culture of Thomasville. His Christian mysticism, storytelling, and rangy physique add multidimensionality to his persona as manual workman.




Voicebox
Presented by the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina (CRA-NC) (December 10, 2003)

Voicebox is also presented as part of the programming for Materia Oscura/Dark Matter: Photographs of Urban Africa and the Diaspora by Kerry Stuart Coppin, on display at CDS through January 10, 2004, with support from the North Carolina Arts Council.

Note: This event will be held on the second Wednesday of the month, rather than the usual Fresh Docs time (the third Wednesday).

Voicebox is a series of four thirty-minute episodes that explore the values and concerns of African American men and of other members of the Triangle community in relation to them. Each episode uses a dramatization or other creative visual to give context for the issues being discussed; a roundtable discussion with African American men; and additional exploratory one-on-one interviews with community members of other ages and ethnicities. African American males have been traditionally defined by a marginal few. This initiative offers an opportunity for another segment of the African American community to define themselves.

Each episode focuses on a specific topic. The topics for roundtable discussion are: 1) Relationships and Spirituality, 2) Class and Education, 3) Stereotypes and Media, and 4) Economics/Finance.

CRA-NC is actively engaged in anti-racism work within the financial and housing sectors. This work is grounded in the experience of the agency and its staff as they wrestle with race and public and corporate policy. CRA-NC developed and distributed a book and photo exhibit, Too Much Month at the End of the Paycheck, and a video Payday Lending: The Musical; both had a significant impact on public discourse about payday lending at the local, state, and national level. CRA-NC’s Media Advocacy program is using Voicebox as another media production to foster change.




8th Annual Documentary Film and Video Happening
(November 14-16, 2003)
Featured Filmmaker Hannah Weyer





Cockfight at the Velasco’s Every Saturday Night: Portraits of Family and Community
with Luis Velasco (October 15, 2003)

Through photography and narration, Luis Velasco explores his past familial connections to cockfighting and looks at present-day communities that continue with both informal contests and highly structured stadium competitions. Velasco has spent the past three years photographing a cockfighting community in Virginia, and following the Freemans, old family friends who introduced the Velascos to cockfighting and currently compete on a national level. Velasco has shown his work at the North Carolina Museum of Art; his photographs have been published in Student Action with Farmworker's Recollections of Home/Recuerdos de mi Tierra, a bilingual publication that documents the cultural traditions of Latino farmworkers and their families in the Carolinas, and The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Velasco teaches photography and is the photography coordinator at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Artist's Statement:
Since my mother passed away, I want to remember any thread of our time together. A time when my whole family was together as one. We would sit around the table remembering and laughing about our stories of cockfighting. My mom would ask us, do you remember that cockfighter Milton Sanders? We would all laugh by just the mention of his name. Milton was the cockfighter who let us kids dump dirt in his living room for a cockfighting pit.

When I was five, my father, Albert, was the pitmaster of a cockfighting ring. My father was handler, field person, and conditioner. Cockfight at the Velascos' every Saturday night. My father had the whole family involved. My grandmother made tacos and enchiladas; my mother and sisters sold the food. When my older brother Ron was seventeen, my father was teaching him to handle the birds. My other brother and I held the chickens as my father tied the gaff on their legs. My family now looks back on that time and all we can do is laugh about it. My brother Alfred said, "It's crazy if you really stop and think about it. We converted grandma's house into a cockfighting ring." We did this for a year, until December 31, 1975. After that, the fights continued at Milton Sanders' house and with the Freemans until 1978.

The Freemans were the pivotal force that essentially propelled my family into the world of cockfighting. The Freemans are still competing, but the hands have changed from father to son. I have been documenting the Freeman family for the past two years. I traveled to Oklahoma to the Mid-America Gameclub Championships to see the Freemans compete. I met people who remembered when my father ran cockfights. I was surprised by how much my father is still remembered and loved. The older guys were happy to see me, but asked where's "Big Al"? It's his legacy that I was part of, the memory I had never spoken ­ they were telling me things that were inside me. —Luis Velasco




The Guestworker (formerly Bienvenidos a Carolina del Norte)
Produced and directed by Cynthia Hill and Charles Thompson (September 17, 2003)

Every year more than 10,000 Mexican men are recruited and sent by bus to North Carolina to work on farms throughout the state. Neither undocumented workers nor citizens of this country, they have been recruited and given H-2A visas to work jobs that farmers say no one else will take. The program is popular with farmers and farming organizations, but farmworker advocates oppose the program, claiming it does not protect the rights of farmworkers. The Guestworker documents the stories of three men in this program, the challenges they face, and the impact their presence has on North Carolina farms and communities.




Dalton Got Hit
Produced by Mary Dalton (August 27, 2003)

This personal documentary explores how lives change in a moment, when the filmmaker's son is involved in a traumatic accident. On April 30, 2002, nine-year-old Dalton Smoot was struck by a van at the end of his driveway as he prepared to walk to school. His mother was watching. Interviews with Dalton, his mother, his doctor, and others help contextualize the accident into a short life marked by other obstacles he has already overcome – four months in neonatal intensive care for complications related to his premature birth and Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, which has been in remission for three years. One year after the accident, Dalton seems fully recovered and untouched, in marked contrast to his mother, whom he calls "obsessive, paranoid, and overprotective."

Mary Dalton
Dalton Got Hit is Mary Dalton's fourth documentary and her first autobiographical work. After many years of working on other people's film projects, she started making her own films three years ago. She teaches film studies at Wake Forest University, is a media critic for WFDD-FM, and is the author of scholarly works, including a book, The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies.




Experimental Sound
Audio Shorts Presented by Jennifer Deer (July 16, 2003)

Jennifer Deer is new to the world of experimental sound. With a background in theater and radio, she brings to her work a sense of both intimacy and performance.

In the first audio-only work to be presented by Fresh Docs, Jennifer will share sound pieces from a yet-to-be-titled series. These short pieces (six to ten minutes each) combine music, narration, voices, and found-sound – blending the personal radio documentary format with impressionistic soundscape to create something like audio performance art.

These works are an artistic attempt to relate deeply personal stories to a wider audience through the juxtaposition of various elements. Feedback sought from video documentarians and the wider filmmaking community, as well as from those primarily interested in sound and audio.

Jennifer Deer is a freelance radio producer recently relocated to the Triangle from Atlanta. For two years, she hosted ArtVoice, a weekly arts and culture radio magazine, on WABE-FM in Atlanta. Most recently, she has worked as a producer on The State of Things for WUNC-FM and as a volunteer staff member at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. She holds a degree in theater from UNC-Chapel Hill.




Monster Road: Inside the World of Legendary Underground Animator Bruce Bickford
Directed by Brett Ingram and Co-Produced by Jim Haverkamp (June 11, 2003)

Bruce Bickford's dark and magical animation has fascinated and astounded legions of fans since his collaborations with Frank Zappa in such 1970s films as Baby Snakes and The Dub Room Special. Bickford has been producing work for forty years, yet only a tiny fraction of it has ever been seen by the public.  Monster Road explores Bickford's unique cinematic visions (and nightmares) and offers a glimpse into the rarely seen world of a true visionary.

Brett Ingram is an award-winning independent filmmaker who utilizes a wide range of skills and experiences to produce media for diverse clientele. He has worked professionally as a writer, producer, director, editor, cinematographer, videographer, animator, time-lapse photographer, and sound mixer. His independent films have won a total of nineteen festival awards and have been exhibited in museums and theater venues internationally. He was awarded a 2001 Independent Arts Award by the Independent Weekly.

Jim Haverkamp is an award-winning independent filmmaker and freelance editor with a broad range of production and post-production skills. He was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship by the North Carolina Arts Council in 2000, and his independent films have been shown at numerous film festivals across the country. He is also a former organizer of the Flicker film festival in Chapel Hill and has taught filmmaking classes at the Durham Arts Council. He was awarded an Independent Arts Award by the Independent Weekly newspaper in 2002. 




David Allan Coe
Documentary by Shambhavi Kaul (May 21, 2003)

In post-production, this yet unnamed documentary follows country music outlaw David Allan Coe. Director Shambhavi Kaul and her team were granted otherworldly access into the life and soul of this legendary American icon.  Kaul describes her first experience with the music of David Allan Coe, in a cinderblock bar in the woods of North Carolina: "And one quarter in the juke box produces that quintessential hard-country song, 'You Never Even Called Me By My Name.' The people around me suddenly come to life. The biker salutes with his beer and I notice drunk tears rolling down his face. The man with the toothless smile nods his acknowledgment and the woman by the pool table begins to dance. It is amazing. Faces light up. Everyone knows the words. The music speaks directly from the jukebox into our hearts. This is no poster boy country musician. Hell, David doesn't even have a steady record label! The corner-pub-messiah is belting something great from that little juke box and there is a charge in the air that makes my hair stand on end." To read more about what the director has to say about The Corner Pub Messiah, and view a short trailer, go to http://thebanzai.com/films/.




Standing at the Crossroads
April Walton (April 16, 2003)

Standing at the Crossroads puts a human face on the sustainable agriculture movement by exploring the histories, hopes, and challenges of three native North Carolina farm families. The video profiles how these farmers approach their work with the land as stewards and artisans, preserving not only our cultural heritage, but also the natural resources that support it. Generations of these families have continued to farm driven by a passion for their chosen work and way of life. In the face of encroaching development and rapid economic changes and uncertainties, these farmers maintain a firm belief in the intrinsic value of their labor. This project examines the difficulties faced by three families as they stand at the crossroads of agriculture in North Carolina.

April Walton
For the past eight years, April Walton has worked as a produce manager, buyer, and advocate for sustainable farming. For Standing at the Crossroads, she collaborated with the Carolina Farm Steward Association, whose mission is to support and expand local and organic agriculture in the Carolinas by inspiring, educating, and organizing farmers and consumers. Walton is the night manager/programs assistant at the Center for Documentary Studies.




February One
Steven Channing, Executive Producer; Rebecca Cerese, Producer; Cynthia Hill, Co-Producer (December 9, 2002)

On January 31, 1960, four college freshmen stayed awake late into the night, nervously debating whether to carry out their plan for the next day. What they did changed the course of the American Civil Rights Movement. Using first hand accounts of the events that transpired at a Woolworth lunch counter, February One documents one volatile winter in Greensboro that not only changed public accommodation laws in North Carolina but served as a blue print for nonviolent protests throughout the 1960s.