TOWF Awards First Ever Anniversary Grant to Andrea Kalin

The Tikkun Olam Women's Foundation of Greater Washington, dedicated to supporting programs focused on effecting social change for women and girls, has selected Andrea Kalin to be the recipient of their first ever Anniversary Grant in recognition of their five years of grant-making.

Here are the kind words from TOWF: "We are thrilled to honor Andrea Kalin and Spark Media. We wanted to award an organization that brings our vision of social change for women and girls to fruition. We cannot think of anyone more deserving the award. Kalin's body of work exemplifies our goals for the Anniversary Grant. She produces films that inform and inspire audiences to promote change that contributes to a healthier and stronger society."

Wine, Women and Film: Social Change Through Cinema

Tikkun Olam Women's Foundation is sponsoring a fantastic event next week called "Wine, Women and Film: Social Change Through Cinema." It sounds like it will be a fantastic event - the guest speaker is Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival. We'll be there! You should come out and join us.

WHEN: November 29, 2010 7:00 pm

WHERE: Round House Theater, 4545 East West Highway, Bethesda, MD

TICKETS: Click here for tickets.

DESCRIPTION: From the TOWF website:

When was the last time you watched a great movie? What made it great? Did it make you feel and think, or make you act? On Monday, November 29, Hollywood producer Jane Rosenthal will be showing clips from films that inspire and educate us in a way that only film can. As co-founder with Robert DeNiro of the Tribeca Film Festival, which was established to revitalize lower Manhattan after 9/11, this leading philanthropist will share her insights about the power of film to transport and transform us. But more importantly, Jane will show us films that entertain while increasing our understanding of an issue, and motivating us to action.

It's an evening of visual storytelling. The program honors the 5th Anniversary of the Tikkun Olam Women's Foundation (TOWF), dedicated to creating social change for women and girls. In its five years, TOWF has awarded close to $300,000 to a wide range of transformative organizations, locally and in Israel. With TOWF grants, immigrant teens are being trained to budget and cook healthful meals, then teach their mothers their new skills; young Jewish women are learning that abusive relationships are not about love; Orthodox girls are increasing their participation and sense of belonging in synagogue; and women in Israel are seeking legal equality. TOWF invests in programs that have a lasting impact on the lives of women and girls. When that is achieved, families and communities are transformed.

Come see how films can change our communities and the world!

Miami Screening Tonight!

Just a reminder to all our friends in the Miami area, Soul of a People: Writing America's Story screens tonight at the Miami Book Fair International!

The legendary folklorist, social activist, and Writers' Project alumni Stetson Kennedy will attend the screening and speak to the audience following the movie. This is sure to be a special event; we hope you can make it!!

Here is the more detailed info:

LOCATION:
Miami Dade College
Wolfson Center
300 NE Second Avenue
Building 1; 2nd Floor
Room 1261 (Auditorium)

TIME:
6 pm

NEED MORE INFO?
http://bit.ly/ay5j1h

Join Us For An Evening of Laughter!!

Events at the Gallery!

Allah Made Me Funny is screening tonight at the Pueblo Viejo International Art Gallery in Washington D.C. Director Andrea Kalin will be introducing the film and will lead a discussion afterward.

This landmark concert film follows three acclaimed comedians on stage and off as they lift the veil to reveal the humorous truth of what it's really like to be Muslim in America.

Mo Amer, Azhar Usman, and Preacher Moss poke fun at themselves, their communities, government, human nature and the tricky predicament of living in post-9/11 America.

Featuring music of rising indie scene artists, Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert is rollicking good fun and gives people of all cultural backgrounds an opportunity to laugh hard, drop their guard, and open their minds.

The screening is part of The Sound of Peace Art Show ("Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. Artists Painting Hope"), which includes the art of Shela Qamer, Huda Totonji, Liat Weiler, Arlene Cooper, and more...

We hope to see you there!

WHEN:
November 16. Reception at 6:30 pm and Screening at 7:00 pm

WHERE:
Pueblo Viejo International Art Gallery
3103 Mt. Pleasant St. NW (corner of Irving & Mt. Pleasant)
First Floor
Washington DC 20009
(202) 328-4480

PRICE:
Suggested donation of $5. Part of the proceeds will be donated to Parents Circle Family Forum. To learn more about their work, Click Here.

Spark Media at the TIVA Peer Awards

Spark Media wins 9 at the TIVA Peer Awards

Exciting news this weekend. Spark Media won nine awards at Saturday's TIVA Peer Awards. This is a true honor since the awards are given by our fellow filmmakers. To be given such recognition from our peers made this an incredibly moving and meaningful event for us.

Soul of a People: Writing America's Story won the "Best of D.C." Award, Gold Peer Awards for Scriptwriting (David A. Taylor, Olive Emma Bucklin, and Andrea Kalin), Audio Mixing (Joe Powers) and Music (Joseph Vitarelli and Wall Matthews), as well as a Silver Award for Best Documentary.

Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways won the Bronze Peer Award for Best Documentary.

Partners of the Heart, Spark Media's first feature length documentary, won a Gold Award in the new Classics category.

Game On, a short financial planning film produced for the NFLPA, won the Bronze Award for Best Education/Training Video.

Export Compliance and Customs Awareness also won a Bronze Award for Best Education/Training Video.

For more information about the TIVA Peer Awards, please click here.

Soul of a People at the Miami Book Fair

Soul of a People: Writing America's Story will be screened at the prestigious Miami Book Fair International next Wednesday, November 17th at 6 pm.

The legendary folklorist, social activist, and Writers' Project alumni Stetson Kennedy will attend the screening and speak to the audience following the movie. This sounds like a fun event. If you live near Miami, we encourage you to come out and see the film!

Here is the more detailed info:

LOCATION: Miami Dade College
Wolfson Center
300 NE Second Avenue
Building 1; 2nd Floor
Room 1261 (Auditorium)

TIME: 6 pm

NEED MORE INFO? http://bit.ly/ay5j1h

Soul of People screens tonight in Atlanta!

Soul of a People: Writing America's Story is screening tonight at 8pm at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta!

The screening is a special event connected to the Oral History Association's annual conference. See more information about the Oral History Association at www.oralhistory.org!

More details:

Auburn Avenue Research Library
101 Auburn Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30303

Time: 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm

Tickets: FREE!!!!

We hope you can make it.

Soul of a People at Oral History Association's Annual Conference

Director Andrea Kalin is traveling to Atlanta this week to attend the Oral History Association's Annual Conference and to contribute to a panel on the Federal Writers' Project. The event is being brought to us by the Three Presidents: former OHA President Charles Hardy III; current OHA President who will be performing on fiddle, guitar, and vocals; and OHA President-Elect Rina Benmayor, who will MC the event.

The legendary civil rights activist (and former WPA Project Editor) Stetson Kennedy and author/producer David Taylor (who wrote the documentary's companion book) will also be joining Andrea on the panel.

It's looks to be a special event. Check it out at www.oralhistory.org!

Thanks, and hope to see you there!!

A busy week for Stetson Kennedy!

It has been an exciting week for the legendary Stetson Kennedy, the subject of Spark Media's upcoming documentary Stetson Kennedy Unmasked.

This last weekend, the 94-year old warrior celebrated his birthday by attended the One Nation Working Together Rally in Washington DC. He joined a special youth rally sponsored by NAACP and One Nation youth organizations in the morning and then made his way to the Lincoln Memorial where he enthusiastically worked his way to the front of the crowd to see the prestigious lineup of speakers.

"It's been more than three quarters of a century since President Roosevelt succeeded in bringing together organized labor, the NAACP, and other civil rights groups to attack the first meltdown, " Stetson told the crew, "I was there in 1932, and I'm here now."

Once he returned to Florida, Stetson has wasted no time - tonight he is speaking at a special screening of "Soul of a People" at the Matheson Museum in Gainesville. The event is co-sponsored by the Matheson, the Civic Media Center, and the Alachua County Library District. Please click here to see a Gainesville Sun article about the event. Check back soon for more details!

Dancing with N.E.D. on Kickstarter

Thanks to your enthusiastic support, Dancing with N.E.D. is being featured on the front page of Kickstarter! Thank you to everyone who has donated for this important project. Let's keep the ball rolling!

Check it out HERE.

Soul of a People wins a Bronze Plaque at the Chris Awards!

Exciting news! The Chris Awards have notified Spark Media that they have won a Bronze Plaque in the Humanities Category at the 58th Annual Columbus Film & Video Festival!

Please find more information about this event by clicking HERE.

Have a great weekend!

2nd Annual Rock, Paper, Cocktails Event

Rock, Paper, Cocktails on September 27th, 2010!

Come to a very important event next week - the 2nd Annual Rock, Paper, Cocktails, which raises funds and awareness for the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. On September 27th from 6pm to 9pm, there will be raffles, prizes, and vendors who will donate 10 to 20% of their profits to the OCNA mission!

Spark Media's executive producer Andrea Kalin is attending the event and will introduce our upcoming film ,"Dancing with N.E.D.

Tickets are $10 at the door, which includes complementary appetizers, cupcakes from Georgetown Cupcake and entry for raffle prizes. Come out and join us!

Location:

4906 Brenman Park Drive

Alexandria, VA 22304

For more information, go to the Rock, Paper, Cocktails website HERE.

Hope you can make it!

Docs the Rock is now Dancing with N.E.D.!

Announcing the new title of our upcoming documentary - Dancing with N.E.D.!

Produced by Spark Media and Stone Soup Productions, Dancing with N.E.D. is about one of the year's most talked about rock bands, No Evidence of Disease. N.E.D. is a group of six GYN surgeons, scattered across the country, who create and perform original music to give their patients a voice and raise awareness and funding for the disease they fight.

The film's new title was born out of a conversation between Spark's camera crew and Carole Fagella, participant in the recent Lobby Day event in Washington DC. Carole explained that every woman in treatment for ovarian cancer looks forward to "dancing with N.E.D.," which the film company immediately recognized as the perfect metaphor for the dance between life and death that both the patients and the doctors in the film wrestle with every day.

The film is still in production. A trailer can be seen HERE.

CINE Golden Eagles Announced!

Some exciting news to report this week!

Spark Media has won two prestigious CINE Golden Eagles Awards - for both of our productions for the Smithsonian Channel - Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways and Soul of a People: Writing America's Story.

Congratulations to all the winners. There are some fantastic films in the listing, and we are honored to be among them!

Soul of a People at ALA part 2

Spark has recently edited together a short little montage of library events connected to the Soul of a People: Exhibiting America's Story initiative by the American Library Association and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Check out the video on Vimeo! http://vimeo.com/12986156

The Exhibiting America's Story initiative included 29 libraries that received a grant to support programming in coordination with the release of Spark's documentary, Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, about the Federal Writers' Project. The Writers' Project recruited unemployed men and women and assigned them to fan out across America to learn its history, interview its citizens and produce the first-ever portrait of America from the ground up in a series of state travel guides.

Leading up to the ALA meeting last week, Spark asked the participating libraries how they used the grant and involved their community. Here are some of the responses:


"We turned back the clock to the 1930s for an opening celebration. The day included two lectures, on the New Deal and the Federal Writers' Project, excerpts from the documentary, and period jazz was played outside of the Library welcoming patrons. Sloppy Jos, said to debut in the 1930s, were served and we hosted a Spam treasure hunt. Food products introduced in the 1930s were displayed along with period ads and photos of local interest..." - Beth Keller, Highland Park Public Library, Illinois

"The greatest benefit to the library from this grant came from reaching out to students, staff, faculty, and the community, including scholars from other colleges, theatrical organizations, musicians, artists, other libraries, senior citizen organizations, and historical societies..." - Alma Zyko, Middlesex Community College Library, Connecticut

"The choice of topics was probably one of the best things about the project. The regional variation between the different states' FWP programs led to a really interesting variety of programs..." - Paul Kauppila, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, San Jose State University, California

"We are continuing to use the ideas from the "Soul of a People" programming effort...it was a great learning experience and brought a lot of positive attention to the University Library." - Virginia Haynie Gause, The University of Texas - Pan American, Texas

"Our most successful program was a debate of the New Deal. We had a local journalist and New Deal proponent debate a conservative professor and author of the book "New Deal or Raw Deal?" - Sarah Ormond, Baldwin Public Library, Michigan

"The Soul project here at Armstrong and in the Savannah community was a grand success. The programs were very well attended by a variety of folks whose feedback was very positive. I was impressed by the direction and assistance we got from the ALA/NEH people. We had a lot of support and awfully good material to work with. The Spark Media documentary film, which was shown on the final day, drew a big crowd and all thought it was beautifully done. This was a fine mixture of education and entertainment." - June Hopkins, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Georgia

Soul of a People at ALA

SOUL OF A PEOPLE RETURNS TO ALA

Soul of a People: Writing America's Story made a return visit to this week's American Library Association Annual Conference, held this year in Washington DC.

Last year, ALA and Spark coordinated a NEH-funded Soul of a People library campaign that involved 29 libraries and nearly 150 events across the country. These host libraries held screenings of the film, along with discussion groups, panels and presentations from local scholars and authors, and exhibits connected with the Depression, New Deal and the Writers' Project. They also produced imaginative events such as recreated Hoovervilles and soup kitchens, old time live radio broadcasts, and more, giving each local community a chance to experience and understand their own history during this era.

We will be posting a round-up of activities and a video summary shortly. The video will also be available for library participants to download!

At ALA, Soul of a People's producer and director Andrea Kalin, Spark producer Nancy Camp and representatives from three of the host libraries were on hand to discuss the project and how it carried out at the local level. The librarians who participated were Henry Fortunato (Kansas City Public Library, Missouri), Jude Schanzer (East Meadow Public Library, New York) and Nora Quinlan (NOVA Southeastern Library, Florida). They shared their insights about the program, its challenges, and some of the creative ways the libraries used Soul of a People as a springboard for activities to reach diverse audiences at a local level.

Camp concluded with a brief outline of the work underway - a new youth-focused online educational initiative, being developed now with a grant from the NEH.

Games for Change

A busy, but exciting week ahead. Producers Andrea Kalin and Nancy Camp are heading to New York City for the Games for Change Festival. Sometimes called "the Sundance of video games," the Games for Change Festival highlights games that promote education and address the pressing issues of our world, be it poverty, human rights or climate change. We are looking forward to attending the event (and maybe someday even being featured in the festival itself), and will share the highlights on the Splog soon!

"Worlds of Sound" Wins Special Jury Award

Hear Ye Hear Ye, Spark Media and Smithsonian Networks received the 43rd WorldFest--Houston International Film Festival Special Jury Award for Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways in the Cultural Television Programming category. Congratulations to everybody at Smithsonian Networks, Smithsonian Folkways, and everyone who had a hand in bringing the amazing story of Moses Asch and his fabled label to life. We are all jubilant and proud over here at Spark. Thank you WorldFest!!!

Small World Moment at Interfaith Forum

Andrea Kalin from Spark Media joined in on an all women's interfaith dialogue at the Rumi Forum in Washington, where women from various religious backgrounds -- Michelle Coghill Chatman (Yoruba), Kadiatou Diallo (Muslim), Pat Henry (Buddhist), Chaplin Gladys Lanier (Christian), and Andrea Kalin (Jewish) -- shared their spiritual journey and discussed the lack of representation of women and religious and spiritual content in the media. The event doubled as a "friendraiser" for the television program, Perspectives of Interfaith, taped and aired on Arlington Independent Media, Arlington,VA and soon to be on DCTV, Montgomery Television, CTV in Prince George's County, and several other national public cable access stations.

In a small world moment, Andrea met Kadiatou Diallo, who mentioned how much she enjoyed a movie called Prince Among Slaves, since it described her homeland Guinea. She was especially impressed with the film's historic accuracy and the emphasis on the pivotal role education played in 18th Century Futa Jallon (in modern day Guinea). Kadiatou had never met Andrea, who was also a speaker at the event. Someone pointed out that the director of Prince Among Slaves was on the panel. And then the plot thickened: when Spark Media couldn't get to Guinea to film for Prince Among Slaves, Spark Media met a director of a documentary called Death of Two Sons, who graciously allowed us to use some of his Guinea stock footage. Death of Two Sons is about Kadiatou's son, Amadou Diallo, who's controversial shooting death at the hands of four New York City police officers in 1999 is documented in the film. It was an astonishing moment for everybody.

Smithsonian Folkways artists win GRAMMY award

Smithsonian Folkways Recording artists Los Texmaniacs received a GRAMMY award for their album Borders y Bailes in the Tejano Album category. This is the group’s first GRAMMY win. The Texas-Mexican conjunto band, armed "with an assortment of Tex-Mex beats infectious enough to get even the most sedentary crowd moving" (Washington Post), produced an album that breathes new life into the century-old music of the Texas Rio Grande Valley. Congratulations to Los Texmaniacs, and everyone at Smithsonian Folkways. Explore more Smithsonian Folkways artists, and discover the story behind the fabled label and its legendary founder Moses Asch through Spark Media's documentary Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways.

Upcoming Soul of a People screenings in Florida to include Discussions with Director Andrea Kalin and Stetson Kennedy!

Spark Media's executive producer and director Andrea Kalin will be celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) when she visits Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale to host two screenings of Soul of a People: Writing America's Story with one of the film's subjects, famed author Stetson Kennedy.

The first screening of Soul of a People, which chronicles the efforts of writers around the country in "telling America's story" during the Great Depression, will take place on:

When: Friday, January 22, 2010 at 7 pm

Where: Wolfsonian Museum, Florida International University, 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida

Contact: (305) 535-2644 or (305) 531-1001

The second screening of the documentary will take place on:

When: Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 2 pm

Where: Don Taft University Center's Performance Theater, Nova Southeastern University, 3301 College Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Contact: (954) 262-4613

Originally premiering on the Smithsonian Channel last fall, Soul of a People: Writing America's Story returns audiences to the Great Depression, when Americans endured a crisis not just of economy, but also identity, and millions of unemployed men and women looked to the government for a life raft. Hundreds of thousands found jobs with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), most wielding picks and shovels to build roads and schools. For a smaller cadre, however, the tools were little more than a pen, paper, and the spirit of investigation.

If you live in the Miami or Fort Lauderdale area, definitely come out to the show. Both screenings are FREE and open to the public. Hope you can make it!

Festival Selects "Worlds of Sound" Director's Choice

The Black Maria Film + Video Festival has selected Spark Media's documentary, "Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways," for its Director's Choice. The New Jersey based Festival is an international juried competition and awards tour that rewards cutting edge works from independent film and video makers. This means the one-hour film, narrated by Pete Seeger, and directed by Spark Media president Andrea Kalin, about Moses Asch -- the rebel record producer who founded Folkways Records -- will be hitting the festival circuit through the Festival's national public exhibition program. Keep an eye out for announcements about upcoming screenings. Congratulations to Andrea, Richard Carlin (author of the book, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways), the Smithsonian Channel, Smithsonian Folkways Records, and all the fabulous staff and crew who had a hand in making the film. Cheers.