Project Updates 2007

The God of a Second Chance premieres and Faith in the Hood revs up

Our feature documentary about the spiritual life of two men living in Washington, D.C.’s poorest neighborhood premiered on October 28, 2006 to a sold-out theater at the Virginia Film Festival. Audience response and press reviews were terrific. In 2007 we’ll be working on the expansion of the 82-minute feature into a three-hour series for television to be entitled Faith in the Hood.

Our thanks go to our partners on the project, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and especially to Executive Director James Hunter and Associate Director Josh Yates.

The new series will combine scenes from the feature with other footage shot during the production in Southeast, the inner city neighborhood where we filmed for over a year, following the work of several churches and ministries.

For an insightful article about The God of a Second Chance, take a look here.

Out of Ireland Revisited

One of our greatest successes to date is our feature documentary Out of Ireland: it was invited for competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was a major hit on PBS in 1995. One of the keys to that success was our collaboration with scholar and musician Mick Moloney, who appeared in the film as a commentator and singer and created the remarkable soundtrack. (The film DVD and soundtrack CD are available from Shanachie Entertainment.)

In 2007, we’ll be collaborating again with Mick on an exciting project called Absolutely Irish. Mick will bring together the finest traditional Irish music performers in the world for a once-in-a-lifetime concert that we will film for broadcast on public television. The concert will be staged at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, the top Irish performing arts venue in the country. We’ll also be shooting “backstage” documentary material that will be woven in to the final edited version of the concert. We’ll be shooting the show in April of ’07 for broadcast on St. Patrick’s Day 2008.

We start down The Crooked Road

Also in 2007, we begin research and production on The Crooked Road, our one-hour documentary about the music of Southwest Virginia. With support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, we’ll be scouting locations, visiting archives and planning the creative approach to the film in concert with our team of consultants.

They include Virginia Folklife Program Director Jon Lohman, Blue Ridge Institute Director Roddy Moore, Ted Olson of the Center for Appalachian Studies, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Bill Ferris, and the visionary behind the creation of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, Joe Wilson.

We have grants pending that, if funded, will allow us to begin production in the summer of 2007.

Windhorse is a DVD and a brand new website

Check out our new website for Windhorse here. It has tons of interesting background about the film and how it was made, plus important information about the politics and culture of Tibet.

The new DVD released on New Yorker Films home video includes a documentary about how the film was shot clandestinely inside Chinese-occupied Tibet. There’s also a nifty commentary track on the feature with co-writers Thupten Tsering, Julia Elliott and Paul Wagner.

An Angel for Bobby Buchanan is on the wing

Last but surely not least, we will complete our narrative feature An Angel for Bobby Buchanan, formerly titled Angels, in 2007. The film stars Charlottesville, Virginia luminaries E. Danny Murphy and Boomie Pedersen as a misanthropic rich guy and the humble Irish cook who is the key to his salvation. Once completed, we’ll begin the process of entering the film in festivals and seeking distribution.

Watch for it!