Filmmakers Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen will be present at the screenings

Wed., Sept. 17th, at 8pm
Sat., Sept. 20th, at 12:30pm*
Sun., Sept. 21, at 10:30am*
Fri., Sept. 26th, at 5pm*
Wed., Oct. 1st, at at 5pm*
Wed., Oct. 8th, at 8:15pm
Sat., Oct. 11th, at 10:30*

* reduced ticket price

Producer/Director: Nancy Porter
Producter/Writer: Harriet Reisen

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women is a 90-minute documentary about one of New England’s most notable literary figures, the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott.

The film, a co-production with WNET’s American Masters, explores the surprisingly complex, dramatic and compelling life of Alcott, a world-renowned personality whose true story has never before been told on film. Best known as the author of wholesome stories for young people, Alcott was also the pseudonymous author of pulp fiction thrillers featuring exotic characters doing things no Victorian lady was supposed to know about – for instance, smoking opium and hashish. Alcott’s secret authorial identity was not discovered for more than a half-century after her death, and even now is little known beyond academia.

The documentary weaves a variety of elements — on-camera interviews with scholars, dramatizations shot in historic locations, feature film clips, archival illustrations, contemporary animations, photographs and footage — into a complex, dramatic portrait of this “gutsy, down-to-earth, powerfully driven” independent woman. The true story of Alcott is an eyewitness account of the Transcendentalist era, the Civil War, and the Gilded Age, that is full of startling discoveries and significance for our times.

Project Co-Directors Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen received full production funding, beginning with a major grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities. Subsequent sources were WNET, PBS/CPB, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and The Simons Foundation.

The film is scheduled for national PBS broadcast on American Masters in 2009.

The film will also have its national broadcast premiere on PBS/Frontline
Tuesday, June 17th
9:00 pm

This first film in a series will provide in-depth portraits of ten individuals from China’s Generation X, a social group unlike any other in Chinese history. They come from across China’s sprawling landscape, from vast neon-lit cities, to ramshackle provincial towns and remote villages. Some live on the cutting edge of this new world, while others seem to have been left behind. Together their stories of success and desperation put a human face on China’s breathtaking transformation. Follow-up films on these same individuals will be released every five years through 2024.

Young and Restless in China recently received several awards:
From the Chicago International Film Festival Hugo Television Awards: the Silver Plaque
From the Telly Awards: the Bronze Telly
From the Us International Film and Video Festival: the Gold Camera

The film has also become an official selection of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

From 1902 until 1930, the enormous medical complex on Ellis Island — where for many years, most immigrants tried to gain admittance to the United States — was like no other hospital on earth. It was the largest Public Health Service hospital in the country: twenty-two buildings, in all. More importantly, it was the setting for a conflict that virtually defines the issue of government in America — a conflict between those who wanted to help the dis-enfranchised, and those who wanted to exclude them.

Some powerful and very basic political questions loomed behind hundreds of thousands of medical decisions that the physicians made on Ellis Island. What should America be? And who is it for?

Screening followed by Q & A with filmmaker, Lorie Conway

Thursday, June 5th, 2008
at 7:00 pm

Watertown Free Public Library
123 Main Street
Watertown, MA 02472

Free to the Public

For more info: 617.972.6436

Abandoned in the Arctic is the true story of a young man who makes a kayak expedition to within a few hundred miles of the North Pole following in the footsteps of his great great grandfather, the Arctic explorer Lt. Adolphus W. Greely. His ancestor led a scientific expedition to the high Arctic in 1881 and returned three years later with only five of his 24 men still alive. It was the worst Arctic disaster in American history. In this film spectacular film, James Shedd heads north to discover for himself whether his great great grandfather should be held responsible for the deaths of 19 men, and in the process comes of age and discovers a land of great beauty, adventure and danger. Directed by Boston filmmaker Gino Del Guercio.

A gripping documentary film of four interviews with survivors of the Armenian genocide, Voices tells the stunning tale of a million and a half people who were tortured, starved, and murdered by the Turkish government from 1915 to 1923.

Screening followed by Q & A Session
with director Apo Torosyan

Thursday, May 22, 2008
at 7:00 pm

Watertown Free Public Library
123 Main Street
Watertown, MA 02472

Free to the Public

For more info: Ardis Francoeur 617.972.6436 afrancoeur@watertown-ma.gov

ITVS Program Development Seminar at WGBH
With Richard Saiz and
Guest Filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum

Sat. April 26, 2008 9am – 1pm

Cahners Room, WGBH
One Guest St, Boston 02135
(r.s.v.p. required: carrie_english@wgbh.org )

Senior Programming Manager Richard Saiz will conduct a seminar about the process of developing a project for ITVS from writing the treatment to production considerations as they relate to directorial authority. Clips representing various genres of the documentary form will be shown. The emphasis of this seminar will be the “personal” documentary and will explore challenges posed when the director is both mediator and protagonist; navigating between observer and observed; revelatory moments and self-revelation; self-awareness and objectivity.

He will be joined by Producer and FC member Juan Mandelbaum discussing his new film Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos, that will premiere on Independent Lens in the 2008/9 season. In this ITVS funded film, director Mandelbaum returns to his native Argentina to find out what happened to friends and loved ones who were kidnapped and “disappeared” during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. His searches uncover dramatic stories that reveal the depths of terror experienced by his friends and their families. Their surviving children continue the struggle for memory and justice. Made with funding from the ITVS Diversity Development Fund and Open Call, the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, and Latino Public Broadcasting.

Richard Saiz, SENIOR PROGRAMMING MANAGER, has over 30 years experience as a television journalist, producer, director and writer in both public and commercial broadcasting. He joined the ITVS staff in 1999 as the program manager for Open Call. In that capacity, he improved the initiative by implementing changes including the requirement of works-in-progress and a more rigorous departmental first cut of all proposals as part of the review process. These changes have improved the overall quality of Open Call proposals. Recently, he has led an effort to improve the number and quality of drama projects funded by ITVS. Richard first worked with ITVS as a consultant in 1995 when he was hired as coordinating producer for the series Making Peace. He also served three times as a panelist for Open Call. A long-time producer, his credits include 18 documentaries produced for Westinghouse and national syndication. He has won numerous awards including the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton and “Best TV Documentary” from the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Juan Mandelbaum a documentary producer and director, has also worked as teacher, curator and consultant. His work has been broadcast on a variety of venues, from AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE to SESAME STREET, and has won multiple awards, including national and regional EMMY awards and nominations. Juan was a producer/director at WGBH-Boston on the AMERICAS series, a 10-part series on Latin America for PBS and Channel 4-UK. Juan’s independent productions have been aired on PBS and in many festivals and are in worldwide distribution. These include Caetano in Bahia, Ringl and Pit, A New World of Music, and the Poetry Heaven series on The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Juan studied sociology in his native Argentina, and worked as a journalist, photographer and educator until he left for the US in 1977 to leave behind the military dictatorship. He holds an M.A. in Communications from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Juan is past president of International Film Seminars, organizers of the Flaherty Film Seminars.

RSVP REQUIRED: Limited seating. Please RSVP to Carrie English at carrie_english@wgbh.org

PARKING: Guest Street Garage: Coming down Guest St. from Market St., entry is on the right, after Newbury Comic’s offices. Look for the blue P marking the garage entrance. Upon entering the garage, proceed to the gate and get a ticket. When you reach the third floor, take a right, gong as far as you can toward the side of the garage, and park at the “WGBH VISITOR SPACES” along the fence wall. Do not proceed up the ramp past the second gate. Take your ticket with you to be validated at the end of your event at One Guest Street, on your way out, as the validation is only active for 15 minutes.

RACE TO EXECUTION profiles two cases in which race played a pivotal role in sentencing the defendants to death. The United States criminal justice system has had a long and complex history with the death penalty, with the Supreme Court ruling both for and against it in different instances. Learn about some of the most important cases on race and the death penalty in recent U.S. history. Please join us for discussion with the filmmaker Rachel Lyon and special guest speaker Charles J. Ogletree. A book signing of his latest work, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State, Race and the Death Penalty in America will follow.

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP to Joanne Walsh, jwalsh@richmaylaw.com.

Ana’s Time, a short film written and directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Alice Cox, will premiere in Atlanta, Georgia at the 2008 Atlanta Film Festival on Wednesday evening, April 16, 2008. Ana’s Time is a highly textured cinematic meditation on memory and identity. This diaristic narrative follows 20’s-something Ana through her troubled relationships as she struggles to
confront her past.

Cox, the daughter of Korean immigrants, left her hometown Ovilla, Texas to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While immersed in the world of science, biotech, and the dot-com era, she began to write and make films. Several of her films have screened at festivals in New England and New York City. Now based in Brooklyn, NY, Alice is working on a new feature film script titled, Cult Chimera.

The 2008 Atlanta Film Festival, presented by Turner Broadcasting, will take place on April 10-19, 2008 at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.

According to the Atlanta Film Festival Fact Sheet, “For 32 years, the Atlanta Film Festival has brought the newest and most daring voices working in cinema to Atlanta audiences. This year will be no different, as for 10 days the festival continues the tradition, screening approximately 150 of the finest films selected from more than 1600 entries and 66 countries.” Ana’s Time was funded in part by grants from the LEF Foundation (New England) and the Council for the Arts, MIT, with fiscal sponsorship through the Filmmaker’s Collaborative of Waltham, MA.

Ana’s Time
(c) 2007 Metal Productions
RT: 25 minutes

Writer, Director, Editor: Alice Cox
Producer: Monique Douglas
Director of Photography: Mike Gibisser

Screening Location:
Atlanta Film Festival
Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
931 Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA 30318

Screening Date and Time:
Wednesday April 16, 2008, 7:10pm
Followed by American Showcase selected feature film,
Team Picture, by Kentucker Audley

Contact Info: Alice Cox, alicecox[at]gmail[dot]com, 617-962-6389

At Home in Utopia was also recently awarded a $10,000 outreach grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities’ Liberty and Justice for All initiative for four screenings in Boston, Lawrence, and Lowell targeting activist communities.

Producer – Michal Goldman
Co–producer - Ellen Brodsky

A home of one’s own: that’s the American dream. But what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers, and Communists?

In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one’s home went a long way toward controlling one’s fate.

At Home in Utopia focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony – aka the Coops – the most grass-roots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists or sympathetic to the communist movement. Beginning as a stalwartly secular East European Jewish working class enclave, they were part of an international movement the power of which blows minds today.

In the 1930s they opted to bring their passion for racial justice home, by racially integrating their own cooperative house, with unexpected consequences. An epic tale of the struggle for equity and justice across two generations, the film tracks the rise and fall of one community from the 1920s into the 1950s, paying close attention to the passions that bound them together and those that tore them apart. Along the way, At Home in Utopia bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, nation, language, convention, and sometimes even common sense.

An ITVS co-production in association with WGBH

The film has been selected for a screening at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival on Monday, February 9th, 2009. Scheduled time TBA.

Continuing in the tradition of the old site, the site provides information on FC Programs, Fiscal Sponsorship, FC members, and films made by FC members. Visitors can donate online to support films listed on the site. For more information, contact Bonnie Waltch or Jen Kaplan at 781-647-1102.

Saturday, February 2, 2:00 pm, Pollard Memorial Library, 401 Merrimack St., Lowell