Francesca Talenti
www.FrancescaTalenti.com

Currently teaching animation and production at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Francesca recently won an Honorable Mention at Sundance for her film The Planets. She also just completed Poetry in Motion, a series of animations funded by ITVS. Five of these animations were selected to represent the US at INPUT 2004

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Darnita Goodman last voted when she was 18. Twenty years later, she works double shifts, takes care of her kids and a houseful of extended family, and doesn't have the time or inclination to vote again. Still Struggling explores the reality behind voter apathy, following this working mom as she struggles with daily issues that most politicians claim to care about, but, as Darnita sees it, do very little to change. A moving picture of life in a typically disenfranchised community, the film reveals the multiple factors that contribute to her alienation and ultimate disengagement from the democratic process. [05:30]

Johnny Symons

Johnny's award-wining documentary Daddy & Papa, a story of gay fatherhood in America, had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and has gone on to win more than 15 international awards. It aired nationally on PBS' Independent Lens and is in use at over 200 universities and community groups around the country.

Additional Resources:

Women's Voice Women Vote

Voices For Working Families

The League of Women Voters

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Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker's recent move to D.C., where she discovered her status as a disenfranchised voter, this personal film explores her journey from being a cynical progressive towards her recent decision to vote in the 2004 elections. The filmmaker will incorporate both archival historical footage and a cinema verite style to document her ambivalent return to voting on the eve of an historic election. [08:25]

Charlene Gilbert

Charlene Gilbert's Homecoming, Sometimes I am haunted by memories of red dirt and clay, premiered nationally on PBS and won the NBPC Prized Pieces Award for Best Documentary. Ms. Gilbert also co-authored, with Quinn Eli, a companion book to the film entitled Homecoming: The Story of African American Farmers published by Beacon Press. Her most recent documentary, Children Will Listen premiered at the AFI Silverdocs Documentary Festival this past June and will have its national broadcast premiere on PBS this fall. Ms. Gilbert is also the recipient of the Rockefeller Media Fellowship, Harvard University's Bunting Fellowship, and the Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship award. She is currently working on an experimental documentary on bioethics which she hopes to complete in 2005. The filmmaker incorporates both archival historical footage and a cinema verite style to document her ambivalent return to voting on the eve of an historic election.

Additional Resources:

DC Vote: Working to secure democracy for Washington DC

Sweet Honey In The Rock's Give The People Their Right to Vote

www.stampouttax.com

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A Navajo punk rock band formed by the children of a traditional medicine man and nurtured on the songs and dance of their forefathers turn to a more aggressive brand of music to promote Native American empowerment. With an important national election approaching, they hit the stages of the reservation where they grew up to encourage its people to exercise their political voice through their right to vote. Armed with registration forms and a message of strength through numbers, they play to large, enthusiastic crowds. But with widespread poverty, unemployment, and voter apathy rampant amongst the youth, they face an uphill battle. [07:08]

Aiyana Elliott & Dick Dahl

Aiyana Elliott and Dick Dahl are an independent filmmaking team living in Los Angeles that first worked together on 2000's The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, a documentary feature exploring the work and life of folksinger Ramblin' Jack Elliott, which won the Special Jury Prize for Artistic Achievement at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. In addition to having produced various short documentary projects, they are currently developing a narrative feature entitled El Camino de Dios , which tells the story of a daughter's quest to reconcile with an estranged mother struggling to become a shaman amongst the Huichol Indians.

Additional Resources:

Blackfire

Native Vote 2004

Navajo Nation Get Out The Vote

Rock the Native Vote

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Set inside the Philadelphia Prison system, this film depicts a highly unusual civics education and voter registration program for inmates. The program organizers, a small group of dedicated prison educators and ex-offenders, have registered over a thousand inmates and have no intention of stopping. The film explores one significant reason for low voter turnout–the disenfranchisement of more than 4.6 million Americans with felony convictions–and, at the same time, brings vital voting rights information to inmates and their families. [11:45]

Christiane Badgley

 A longtime collaborator of Marlon Riggs, Christiane co-directed and edited his award-winning last work, Black is...Black Ain't. Her latest film A Prison for McRae (2003) was produced for European Public Television ARTE.

Additional Resources:

Demos

Right To Vote (about Voting Rights for Citizens with Felony Convictions)

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Despite years of disenfranchisement, the Latino and African American communities in Lockhart, Texas are fighting back – registering voters, running for local office, organizing the first ever MLK day march in their community. Texas Majority Minority shows how important voting is, not only in determining elections but also in preventing political apartheid in Texas. [10:44]

Anne Lewis

Anne was associate director for Barbara Kopple's academy award winning Harlan County U.S.A. Her documentaries include: On Our Own Land (duPont Columbia Award), Fast Food Women (POV, Judges' Choice London Film Festival), Justice in the Coalfields (Gold Plaque INTERCOM), and Belinda (CINE Golden Eagle). Anne currently teaches film editing at UT-Austin and continues her 22-year association with the pioneering film group, Appalshop.

Laura Varela

Laura is a San Antonio based filmmaker whose work focuses on cultural preservation and social justice in the Chicano community. Her projects (A Slight Discomfort: Echoes from the Clinic, Liteweight, Planeta Aztlan) have screened in Film Festivals throughout the nation including Latino Film Festivals in the US and Mexico. Laura's new film is about the experience of Latino Vietnam veterans.

Heather Courtney

Heather is an Austin based independent committed to immigrant rights. Her film about Texas day laborers, Los Trabajadores, was broadcast on PBS' Independent Lens series in 2003, and won the IDA David L. Wolper Award. Heather recently returned from a Fulbright fellowship to Mexico, where she spent a year working on her next documentary Letters from the Other Side about the women and children immigration leaves behind.

Additional Resources:

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund

The National Council of La Raza

The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project

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17 seeks to dispel some of the stereotypes surrounding youth voters by focusing on a politically active teen who was a key player in recent challenges to the 26th Amendment: the right of citizens to vote upon reaching the age of 18. [04:32]

Lily Ng

Lily studied American cinema in Paris and documentary film production at Stanford University, where she received an MA in 1996. She has produced and directed five short films, including, Balancing Act, which won an award at the National Educational Media Network.

Lily is a regular contributor to Independent Documentary and DV magazines, and has been integral to several independent documentaries nationally screened on PBS. Switching to the narrative film world, Lily has recently produced the 35mm feature, Happily, Even After, which won the Audience Award at Cinema Epicuria in 2004. Most currently, she has produced two Bay Area shorts, Snakebite and The Horizon, both due out in fall, 2004.

Lee Gardner

Lee became interested in film and video when he saw The Making of Star Wars in second grade. His first foray into directing and editing came when he decided to shave his head and then make a video about it. Since then, Lee has edited dozens of commercial spots, including the Sopranos promo for the 2004 season. He will edit the feature film, The Other Half, during the summer of 2004.

Additional Resources:

About lowering the voting age:

Teen Vote: Working to lower the voting age to 15

Voting Age News

National Youth Rights Association

About youth vote:

Rock The Vote

Youth Vote

Kids Voting USA

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Voter News Service reports that over 5% of the voting population in the U.S. identifies as gay or lesbian. Out Of The Closet Into The Booth explores how the gay community has galvanized itself into a viable voting bloc and what the implications are for the upcoming 2004 presidential elections. [11:23]

Tom Shepard

Tom Shepard produced and directed Scout's Honor, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary and Freedom of Expression Award at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on National PBS. Shepard co-produced and edited Camp Lavender Hill which aired on public television, Free Speech Television, and CNN's International Insight. Previously, Shepard worked as an editor at National Public Radio for Linda Wertheimer and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He graduated from Stanford University where he majored in biology and film. Shepard is currently co-producing and directing a feature documentary about Jehovah's Witnesses and their contributions to civil liberties.

Additional Resources:

The Democracy Project: A non-partisan effort aimed at increasing participation in the democratic process among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allied people.

The Gay Vote

The Data Lounge: The DataLounge has divided the Gay Vote section into more than a dozen sub issues exploring parties, interest groups, candidates and controversies that result from organized gay involvement in national politics.

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For many years, economists have thought about the logic of voting and many have concluded, why bother? At the heart of this story is one of the world's greatest living economists, Public Choice theorist, Gordon Tullock.

This loveable curmudgeon just doesn't believe a rational person would vote - and vote Tullock does not. At the same time he believes that democracy is the best form of government. How can it be then, that voting, the very thing without which there would be no democracy, is merely an irrational exercise to him?

So, what is behind Tullock's thinking? Through pixilated animations, arcane historical footage, and disembodied interviews, this piece puts into pictures the reasoning in Tullock's mind. The point at which the sheer mathematics of "rational abstention" meets real life, is where this surreal tale begins. [07:00]

Josh Kurz

Josh Kurz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His attempts at an early age to fuse the abstract concepts of comedy and science through home video led to many nights filming in the basement.

Eventually this passion drew him out to sunny California where he became educated at USC Film School. However, living in the City of Angels for four long years without a car turned out to be hell. Soon after graduation, with a longing for the subway and tired of perpetual sunshine, Josh returned to New York and began directing offbeat interstitial segments for Comedy Central, ABC, Fox, and Noggin. The segments ranged from an explanation of cloning using large balls of Jell-O to an infomercial that explained how the ancient pyramids were built.

Determined to reinvent children's television programming, he has returned to the West Coast (with car) and currently lives in the megalopolis that he now loves, Los Angeles.

Chris Metzler

After graduating from USC with a degree in business and cinema, Chris' film career has taken him from the depths of agency work, to coordinating post-production for awful American movies seen late at night in Belgium.

His film directing and producing work has led him to criss-cross the country with the aid of caffeinated beverages, making his way in the Nashville country and Christian music video industries, finally forsaking his soul to commercial LA rock n' roll. These misadventures eventually culminated in him winning a Billboard Magazine Music Video Award.

Burned out and hung over, he eventually fled to San Francisco to complete work on his award-winning feature documentary, PLAGUES & PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA.

Additional Resources:

About Gordon Tullock:

Gordon Tullock's bio

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