Spring, 2011

Kentucky—an American Story: the Land was broadcast on KET on May 24. Many thanks to Executive Director Shae Hopkins, Program Director Craig Cornwell and Producer Matt Grimm of Kentucky Educational Television for making it happen. Our partner on the project is writer/historian/film producer Daniel Blake Smith.

We also want to thank KET for entering our documentary Thoroughbred in the competition for a regional Emmy Award. The film was broadcast on PBS nationally the week before the Kentucky Derby. And we loved presenting it in April to our friends here in Charlottesville at the Paramount Theater, along with the "star" of the film, Arthur Hancock, and his wife Staci.

The other very nice news is that we have been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete editing on Heartland Passage, our half-hour documentary about industrial decline along the Erie Canal. This is a project we’ve been working on with longtime friend and colleague Steve Zeitlin at Citylore. The grant was to our non-profit organization, American Focus, Inc. The project is a co-production with Steve’s New York-based non-profit, City Lore. We’ll be doing some archival research and pick-up filming along the canal later this year, then completing the editing in the spring of 2012.