As We Sleep

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Ashray

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Denied

Filmmaker
Julie Winokur

When I met Sheila Wessenberg, she was living the American nightmare.

She had a potentially fatal illness, but because she was uninsured her life seemed expendable.

She said to me, “There is no reason why anyone should be shoved into homelessness and helplessness just to live.” She was referring to the fact that she could only get publicly funded health care if she gave up her home and her car. In the meantime, her doctor had abandoned her and she had already gone seven months with no chemotherapy.

I was so horrified by the real-life cost of poor public policy that I became obsessed with all the ‘Sheilas’ whose lives were on the line. I realized Sheila could be any one of us—could even be me. I wanted to shout from the highest rafter that she was being dealt one of the greatest injustices I had witnessed in the 20 years I’d been a journalist. 

We first published Shelia’s story in The New York Times Magazine. Readers were so shocked by her suffering that they donated over $50,000 in order to help the family stay afloat. Next, we published Sheila’s story in a book and exhibition called Denied, which was shared on Capitol Hill and toured to state capitols across the country.

But our work wasn’t done because U.S. health care policy hadn’t budged an inch. We decided we had to tell Sheila’s story in film so even more people could see the shocking truth. Considering the raging debate on health care reform in Washington now, inclusion in the Media That Matters Film Festival couldn’t be more relevant or more urgent.

Diana

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Diane Wilson, A Warrior’s Tale

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Don’t Worry

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Esmeraldas: Petroleum and Poverty

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Every Third Bite

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

Fast and Reliable

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Food for Thought

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Food Justice: A Growing Movement

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Hammoudi

Official selection of the Eighth Annual Festival

I Promise Africa

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

I’m Just Anneke

Filmmaker Jonathan Skurnik

I’m Just Anneke is the first film in a four-part series of short films called The Youth and Gender Media Project designed to educate school communities about transgender and gender nonconforming youth. The first two films in the series are finished and the second two are in production. The completed films are already being used in schools and conferences throughout the U.S. to train administrators, teachers and students about the importance of protecting all children from harassment due to gender identity and expression.

Transgender and gender fluid youth are the most courageous people I have ever met. Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to an oppressive gender binary paradigm, they refuse to do it in order to be true to themselves. I wanted to pay tribute to these courageous young people and to inspire all of us to reconsider our own decisions about gender identity and expression.

Anneke is going into eighth grade in the fall of 2010 and I plan to film her over the course of her first year in high school. This footage will become a feature length documentary about Anneke’s life as she starts to take testosterone and begins a slow and thoughtful transition to fully embody her own unique gender identity.

In Transit

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Inch By Inch: Providence Youth Gardens for Change

Teachers and students in Providence, Rhode Island get their hands dirty and their lives enriched.

iThemba

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Laugh at the Fat Kid

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Looking Back

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

Luv Me Latex

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!

Filmmaker Gus Andrews

The Media Show is a YouTube channel series staring puppets Weena and Erna, two high-school-aged sisters skipping school to spend time making their own videos in an abandoned storage closet in an advertising agency in New York City. The show’s model of media literacy aims to reconcile the exuberance of fan-created media with a critique of ad-driven corporate media.

In this episode of The Media Show, My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!, Weena and Erna happen across a terrible graphics job in Cosmopolitan, leading them to the website Photoshop Disasters, which gets them thinking about other photo manipulation throughout history. Stalin, Hitler, OJ Simpson, Beyoncé—who hasn’t been touched by photo alteration in some way? The girls explore art and propaganda and end up playing with Photoshop themselves, taking control and manipulating their own appearance.

By primarily distributing online, we aim to enter into a dialog about media where young producers, both casual and political, are already displaying and critiquing their work. We hoped this episode might be many things to many people. To viewers on YouTube, it has prompted dialog about whether media can simply be dismissed as “fake” and how photos are involved in the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) community online. To educators, we hope it offers Photoshop Disasters and ad agency websites as potential materials for media literacy lessons, while sparking some new ideas on how to approach the topic. We even hope that this might give ad agency creatives a moment to reflect on the impact of their work.

Neglected Sky

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Night Visions

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

No Escape, Prison Rape

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Novela, Novela

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Profit Cola

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Rebel

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Recycle

Official selection of the Sixth Annual Festival

Seeds of Hope: South Africa

Official selection of the Fourth Annual Festival

Silence Speaks

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

Still Standing

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Storm

Official selection of the Third Annual Festival

The Farm Sanctuary

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

The Future of Food

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

The Last Town

Filmmaker Yan Chun Su

In order to complete the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project in China, a total of sixteen historical towns, some with more than 2000 years of history had to be flooded. Kai Xian was the last of the 16 towns. Filmed in Kai Xian shortly before the final relocation, The Last Town is a portrait of the town and its residents as they ready (or not) themselves for the big move.

Facing widespread land disputes and unfair relocation assignment, many of the unprivileged residents had to deal with the hardship of not only leaving their homeland behind, but also how to make a decent living afterward. Dust-filled streets and crumbled houses provided the backdrop for stories of ordinary residents dealing with the uncertainty ahead.

I felt compelled to see what old Kai Xian looked like after I found out it was the last old town to be flooded for the Three Gorges Dam Project. What I saw was quite surreal. People burning door frames, window frames on the street, metal salvagers picking on piles of rubble, and the almost eerie contrast between ordinary, everyday activities and the fact that people there were going through a historical time—they were the witnesses and also part of a town’s more than one thousand years of history about to be flooded forever.

The residents still struggling to make the move discovered me very quickly on the street and I was able to record this small glimpse of their lives. It is hopeful that by having their voices recorded, their stories and situations could weigh in on future developments with such profound human impacts.
Old Kai Xian town was completely flooded in 2009. Corruption is still widespread.

Many people are struggling in the new city. In order to rake in as much profit as possible, contractors appointed by local government constructed sub-standard housing and immigrants with little financial and political backing were more likely to be assigned to live in those buildings. 

The Meatrix

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Tyttonen (The Young Girl)

Official selection of the Seventh Annual Festival

Uninsured in the Mississippi Delta

Filmmaker
Katie Falkenberg

At a time when the health care debate is at the forefront of the political agenda, Uninsured in the Mississippi Delta puts a human face on the struggles of the 46 million Americans surviving without health care.

The Mississippi Delta is one of the most impoverished and uninsured regions of the United States. The area also has soaring rates for diabetes, hypertension and stroke, and some of the highest mortality rates and lowest birth rates in the nation. The town of Greenville, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, has, on a per-capita basis, the highest number of uninsured households in the country. Contributing factors to this statistic include high unemployment rates, poverty,  business owners who cannot afford health insurance for their workers, and agricultural jobs that are often only seasonal. Those who have jobs that pay minimum wage cannot afford health insurance on their own.

Howard Moncrief and Edward Smith are among those living in the Delta struggling without health insurance. Both of these men, putting the needs of their children and families before their own, have gone without vital health care and medicines. They simply could not afford them.

Inspiration
I had been following the debate on the health care bill in Congress, and was moved by the stories I had heard from those who were struggling without insurance while working on a photo and video project about a Remote Area Medical (RAM) free health care clinic in Appalachia the year before. I knew that this year, with the health care issue being at the forefront of this administration’s agenda, I wanted to tell another story to put a human face with the statistics being talked about so frequently in the Capitol and on the news.

When I heard that 34% of the households in the impoverished Delta town of Greenville, Mississippi were living without health insurance, I knew that this was a story that needed to be told. As I began researching the story, I learned that the problem wasn’t just concentrated in Greenville; it extended throughout the entire Mississippi Delta region into the rural areas where poverty was rampant and there were few jobs.

Many of the folks who are patients at the two health care clinics I spent time in for this film—the Good Samaritan Health Clinic in Greenville, and the Tutwiler Clinic in Tutwiler—would go without the most basic and vital care if these clinics did not exist. This was a driving force behind my inspiration for this film: that, because of the cost of health care and insurance, people would have to go without the care they desperately need, were it not for these clinics.

Furthermore, it is not only the people in the Delta; it is the 46 million other Americans throughout the country.

Water Warriors

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food

Will I Be Next?

Official selection of the Ninth Annual Festival

World On Fire

Official selection of the Fifth Annual Festival

Young Agrarians

Official selection of the Media That Matters: Good Food