Surviving Hitler: A Love Story
John-Keith Wasson, Director

As a teenager in Nazi Germany, Jutta is shocked to discover she is Jewish. She joins the German resistance and meets Helmuth, an injured soldier. The two become sweethearts and coconspirators in the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler. Surviving Hitler: A Love Story is a harrowing tale of war, resistance and survival. At the center of the documentary is a love story for the ages, original 8mm footage (shot by Helmuth) and, miraculously, a happy ending.

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MARS
Geoff Marslett, Director

A new space race is born between NASA and the ESA when Charlie Brownsville, Hank Morrison, and Dr. Casey Cook compete against an artificially intelligent robot to find out what's up there on the red planet. MARS follows these three astronauts on the first manned mission to our galactic neighbor. On the way they experience life threatening accidents, self doubts, obnoxious reporters, and the boredom of extended space travel.This romantic comedy is told in the playful style of a graphic novel- using a unique animation process that director Geoff Marslett developed specifically for the film. Underneath the silliness Mars is also an exploration of exploration. Why do we want to know what is out there? How do we react to what we find? Is it really that important? And where does love fit into the whole thing?

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World's Largest
Amy Elliott, Co-Director

Desperate for tourism, hundreds of small towns across the U.S. claim "world's largest" things, from 15-foot fiberglass strawberries to 40-foot concrete pheasants. World's Largest visits 58 such sites and profiles Soap Lake, Washington’s five-year struggle to build the World’s Largest Lava Lamp.  By documenting these roadside attractions, World’s Largest captures the changing, perhaps even vanishing, culture of small-town America.

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NY Export: Opus Jazz
Ellen Bar, Executive Producer

Shot on location in New York City, NY Export: Opus Jazz takes Jerome Robbins‘ 1958 “ballet in sneakers” and reimagines it for a new generation in this feature-length scripted adaptation.  Starring an ensemble cast of New York City Ballet dancers, and photographed on 35mm, the film had its world premiere at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival, where it won the Emerging Visions Audience Award, and its national broadcast premiere on PBS in March 2010.

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We Still Live Here
Anne Makepeace, Director

Celebrated every Thanksgiving as “the Indians” who saved the Pilgrims, then largely forgotten, the Wampanoag of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, spurred on by their intrepid Wampanoag linguist and MacArthur honoree Jessie Little Doe Baird, are saying loud and clear, in their Native tongue,
“Âs Nutayuneân,” – “We still live here.”

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Sahkanaga
John Henry Summerour, Writer/Director 

What would you do if you stumbled upon a secret that could destroy your family’s business, ruin your chances at love, and completely upend your community? When a teenager in rural Georgia makes a gruesome discovery in the woods, he finds himself contending with these monumental questions.

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Concrete, Steel & Paint
Cindy Burstein, Co-Director/Producer
Tony Heriza, Co-Director/Producer 

When men in a Pennsylvania state prison join with victims of crime to create a mural about healing, their views on punishment, remorse, and forgiveness collide. Finding consensus is not easy as the participants move through the creative process, but mistrust gives way to surprising moments of human contact and common purpose.

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The Wise Kids
Stephen Cone, Writer/Producer/Actor/Director 

 A thoughtful and evocative coming-of-age drama, The Wise Kids takes place in the transitional space between high school and college, when life seems to be all questions and no answers, and the future is scarily wide open. Set in and around a Charleston, SC Baptist church, weaving through this ensemble piece are three main characters - Brea, an introspective pastor's daughter experiencing debilitating doubt; the hyperactive Laura, Brea's best friend and a devout believer; and Tim, the open-hearted son of a single father, confronting his homosexuality for the first time. Tensions and buried feelings abound, as colleges are chosen, adults behave badly, and Brea, Laura, and Tim attempt to hang onto what they have, all the while yearning to break free.

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Welcome to Shelbyville
Kim Snyder, Director/Producer/Writer

Welcome to Shelbyville chronicles America at a crossroads, through the lens of one rural town in the Bible Belt of Tennessee. A stone’s throw from the birthplace of the KKK, the town grapples with its segregated past, while at the same time navigating the arrival of Latino immigrants and newer Somali refugees, who have come to work in the local chicken plant. Set during the beginnings of an historic new administration, a declining economy and unprecedented demographic shifts, an ensemble cast of colorful, irreverent characters represent life in small town America, at a critical time in our country’s history. 

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The Toe Tactic
Emily Hubley, Writer/Director/Animator

The Toe Tactic brings to life a layered world of reality and imagination, through the combination of Hubley’s distinctive, handdrawn animation and live action. Hubley, who has been making animated shorts for 30 years, unspools the whimsical story of a young woman engulfed by loss, and the mystical events she encounters over the course of a problematic, but magical weekend. Winsome newcomer Lily Rabe interacts with animated forms that push, pull, and caress their real-life cohabitants through a journey of renewal. The kinetic flow of Hubley’s feature debut is enhanced by Yo La Tengo’s equally innovative score.

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A Good Man
David Simpson, Editor
Bob Hercules, Co-Director
Gordon Quinn, Co-Director

A Good Man follows acclaimed director/choreographer Bill T. Jones (Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Still/Here, FELA!) as he and his company create their most ambitious work, an original dance-theater piece, in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s Bicentennial. Through two tumultuous years, we witness raw moments of frustration, as Jones struggles to communicate his vision to his dancers and collaborators, as well as moments of great exhilaration, when movement transcends the limitation of words. Jones and his company come face to face with America’s unresolved contradictions about race, equality, and the legacy of our 16th President.

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A Bird of the Air
Margaret Whitton, Director
Steven Tabakin, Producer 

Lyman (Jackson Hurst) is a loner whose job patrolling highways at night aiding stranded motorists, keeps him at a distance from other people. When a rare, highly talkative parrot flies into his home one day, Lyman needs to figure out where the bird comes from and tries to decode its often cryptic utterances. Enlisting the aid of Fiona (Rachel Nichols), an unconventional librarian who is as interested in Lyman’s secrets as she is in the bird’s, the pair set off on a search that doesn’t always lead them where they think they’re going, but gradually leads them to one another.

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Ahead of Time
Zeva Oelbaum, Producer

Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Ruth Gruber defied tradition from the moment she became the world’s youngest PhD at the age of 20 in 1931. She went on to become the eyes and conscience of the world as a journalist, photo-journalist and member of the Roosevelt administration. The first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic in 1935, Ruth traveled to Alaska for the U.S. Dept of Interior in 1942, and was chosen to escort 1000 Holocaust refugees to America in 1944. Ruth turns 100 years old in October 2011 and the film reveals that her trail-blazing spirit and moxie are still inspiring to this day.  

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Barbershop Punk
Georgia Sugimura Archer, Director/Producer/Writer

In a privatized American Internet, is big business “Big Brother” or does the free market protect and serve the needs of the average citizen with its invisible hand? With the simple act of swapping files, barbershop quartet baritone Robb Topolski finds himself at ground zero of a landmark case whose outcome will affect the rights of every American citizen. Following one man’s personal quest to defend what he believes to be his inalienable rights, Barbershop Punk examines the critical issues surrounding the future of the American Internet and what it truly means to be “punk.” The film features discussions with Henry Rollins, Janeane Garofalo, U.S. Congressmen Chip Pickering, Clinton White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, Michelle Combs of the Christian Coalition, lobbyist Jack Burkman and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein.


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A Gift for the Village
Tom Landon, Co-Director/Producer
Jenna Swann, Co-Director/Producer

In June of 2007, seven friends traveled from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the village of Jomsom in the Himalayas of Nepal, to deliver a painting by American artist Jane Lillian Vance. The painting depicts Tsampa Ngawang, a Tibetan Amchi, or doctor and mind healer.
The film is narrated by Public Radio’s Lisa Mullins. The cross-cultural project has received the blessing of his Holiness the Dalai Lama, and examines the connections between an American community reeling in the face of the killings at Virginia Tech, and a remote Himalayan region fighting to preserve its way of life in the face of encroaching modernization.

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You Don't Know What I Got &  We Shall Not be Moved
Linda Duvoisin, Writer/Producer  

you don’t know what i got
Life. Love. Passion. Five women lay their heart and soul on the line: singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco, activist/poet Linda Finney, police officer Julie Brunzell, artist/architect Myrtle Stedman, and housekeeper Jimmie Woodruff. Through a tapestry of homespun stories, confessions, advice, music and poetry, we discover a cross-section of American women with an extraordinary passion for life.

We Shall Not Be Moved: The Nashville Sit-ins
The Nashville Sit-ins of 1960 were among the most important events of the Civil Rights Movement. Over a period of several months, college students from Fisk University and other schools, staged a very well-organized, non-violent protest at downtown lunch counters. The protests caught the city's white establishment off-guard, and culminated in the mayor agreeing to end segregation of lunch counters while facing thousands of protestors gathered on the steps of City Hall and the eyes of the nation watching. It was just the first step in ending segregation in all facets of life throughout the city and it inspired similar movements throughout the South.

We Shall Not Be Moved: The Chattanooga Sit-ins
In February of 1960, at the same time that the better-known Nashville lunch counter sit-ins were taking place, students in Chattanooga staged their own, similar protest. As there was no local college for black students at the time, the Chattanooga protests were organized and carried out by Howard High School students. Their inspiring, first-hand accounts of the sit-ins bring to life the dangers and fears they endured to force change in their own community and our country. Their participation in the movement confirmed the endless potential and power that youth can have when it is motivated to do good.

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