We didn’t set out to make América, or even go looking for a story like it.

Rather, it was born out of a chance meeting.We were working in Puerto Vallarta on a different project that was going nowhere fast when we met Diego at a mutual friend’s birthday party. As anyone who has met him can attest, his small frame belies his outsized and gregarious personality. He regaled us with stories about his work as a circus artist and his love for Alejandro Jodorowsky. He ended up crashing with us that night.

It was the first of many such nights. As we slinked around Vallarta for a few more months, trying to make something of our other project, Diego was our constant companion. And when one day he announced that he had to return home to Colima to care for his grandmother, we followed him not as a subject but as a friend.

There we met América for the first time and were taken by the secret language Diego seemed to share with her. Though at that point it wasn’t clear where their story was headed, or that there was a story at all, we immediately felt their dynamic was more compelling than whatever else we were working on. With our friendship with Diego as the foundation, we ended up following the family for the next three years, with Erick intermittently living with them to film.

To be sure, it wasn’t hard to be intrigued by Diego and his brothers—this hangout crew of artists who juggled circus, marijuana and a search for deeper meaning alongside the responsibilities of adulthood. They were our fellow creatives and age peers. Like them, we also had aging family members, some with the early, devastating flashes of dementia. Unlike them, we were far from home. To see other young men at similar points in their lives commit themselves full-time to caregiving was inspiring.

Still, the situation presented entirely new challenges for us as filmmakers. Though more people are living with dementia than ever before, their stories remain underrepresented on screen, in part because they are difficult stories to tell, perhaps especially for documentarians. A common misconception is that those with dementia cease to be themselves as they lose their memory. Though for us, as for Diego, América's personhood was never in question, in place of one-time consent to a long-term project, we sought to renew participation with her each time we filmed.

It was also important for us to remain alert to América’s desires and needs when filming. On the rare occasion that she seemed bothered by the camera, we stopped. Then in editing, we had to determine what was essential to portray honestly the immense physical and emotional demands of care, whilst respecting her dignity and privacy. This determination wasn’t always easy, and ultimately audiences will decide whether they think we got it right.

Throughout the process, we were guided by Diego’s examples—for him, América’s vulnerability and dependence never negated her humanity. Beyond the confines of dementia, every day presented new opportunities for joy, laughter, beauty and love. In this spirit, we wanted the film to emphasize all that América had to give, rather than what she required.

Nearly everyone deals with a care situation at some point in their lives—whether it be for a parent, grandparent, other family member or themselves. But few will be celebrated in a documentary film for their efforts. Though the brothers deserve enormous credit for the energy and tenderness they brought to América, there are countless millions whose work as caregivers goes unseen and undervalued.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine work more essential to human life than caregiving, and yet this labor is commonly unpaid or underpaid. It is also work typically performed by women, especially immigrant women and women of color, who are sometimes imagined to be “natural” caregivers. We reject this sexist, racist premise! The brothers demonstrate that anyone—even twenty-something circus artists—can find value and dignity in care work.

The question is whether society can reflect that value. The fall of real wages in recent decades has made it difficult to support a family on a single income, forcing traditional caregivers to seek work outside the home. Family and friends who step in sacrifice their own wellbeing to do so, and paid caregivers toil for low wages without basic workplace protections. As can be seen in the film, care work is real work, it’s hard work and it deserves the same social recognition and entitlements afforded to other types of labor.

But rather than meet the growing need for care with greater assistance for families and care workers, governments have enacted steep cutbacks in public services. Today, high quality care is available only to those who can afford to pay for it, and vulnerable populations are left with few options.

We believe everyone is entitled to high-quality care, regardless of income, and we stand with the movements of care workers, mothers, elderly people and people with disabilities fighting for universal and comprehensive care coverage that expands options for people needing care and their families and provides a living wage for care workers.

América is the story of three brothers who come together to care for their grandmother. Though in its domestic intimacy it may seem far removed from the politics of care, it was a yawning lack of social support that brought them together in the first place, and that also birthed the stressors that tore them apart. As viewers watch Diego and his brothers struggle to give the best care possible to América, we hope they will be inspired to imagine a society that regards caregiving as the essential life-giving work that it is.

—Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, Filmmakers, América

CYNTHIA: I was in Indonesia in 2012 and someone there said to me, “If you want to consider a new topic for a documentary, you should look into the mudflow.” I thought, what? I’d never heard of the disaster before. I visited the mud site for three days and conducted initial interviews on film and gathered enough material to make a three-minute film teaser.

It took a year to put the crew in place and to find my co-director, Sasha Friedlander, who grew up partially in Indonesia, worked as a journalist there, and is fluent in Bahasa. Then it was another five years of fundraising and production. We worked with both an Indonesian and a U.S. crew.

SASHA: I lived in Indonesia between 2007 and 2009, working for the Bali Post as a journalist and translator. During that time I’d covered the devastating story of the Lapindo mudflow in East Java, and I remember feeling moved and inspired by the protests mounting against the gas drilling company. Because the owner of that company was a key political figure in Indonesia, the government heavily censored the stories that were coming out in the news, so the coverage never left the archipelago.

When I received an email from Cynthia in May 2013 about the possibility of collaborating on a film about the mudflow, it was the first time I’d heard the story mentioned since I left Indonesia in 2009. I knew that there was a presidential election coming up in 2014. That offered a glimmer of hope for the mudflow victims, who were still waiting for their reparations from the drilling company. I was excited to get back to Indonesia and learn more about the situation through the lens of the activists. Cynthia and I hoped to make a film that would resonate with a Western audience. During the six years that we were filming Grit, we could never have imagined how many parallels would emerge between this story in East Java and the issues here in the United States.

Our hope is that audiences will leave the theater with a better understanding of the world’s largest Muslim country. We want people to think about the urgency for political engagement, the importance of women in leadership roles, and the power of art and perseverance in social and environmental struggles. It’s hopeful that we’re seeing young people stepping up and demanding change worldwide. After watching this story unfold, we hope audiences are inspired to cultivate their own determination, their own grit.

—Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander, Directors, Grit

Industrial accidents are a fact of life in the modern world. Oil spills, chemical explosions, leaks of toxic waste, and other disasters can devastate individual lives and communities for generations. The lesson uses an Indonesian drilling explosion documented in the film, Grit, to explore what ethical and equitable recovery from such disasters might look like. Students will use role play and group discussion to explore how stakeholders can increase understanding and come to consensus about steps required to make everyone whole. The lesson can be adapted to focus on business ethics, safe science and engineering practices, government regulations and responsibility, civic engagement, or all of these.

OBJECTIVES
In this lesson, students will:
Learn about Indonesia and a devastating drilling accident that occurred in 2006 with effects ongoing
Use discussion and role play to consider how emotional reactions and differences in goals can effect long-term response to and recovery from industrial disasters
Practice perspective-taking (standing in someone else’s shoes)
Create a reflection on what they’ve learned, either in writing, art, or a multimedia project

GRADE LEVELS: 11-12

Subject Areas
Civics / Government
Global Studies
Business
Earth Science
Ecology / Environmental Science
Ethics
Research Skills
English/Language Arts

MATERIALS
Film Clips and a way to screen them; Internet connection; a way for students to share lists

ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED
90 minutes plus homework

In a once-thriving farm community, Nick Nolan, his wife Celeste, and their young family are on a journey to resurrect his grandfather's dairy farm. Farmsteaders takes place in the rolling foothills of Ohio, just a few miles north of the Ohio River, where, like countless other places in rural America, a once thriving agriculture economy has given way to the pressures of agribusiness and corporate farming. Fertile farmland is unused, barns are falling over, health issues are skyrocketing.

Farmsteaders points an honest and tender lens at everyday life in rural America, offering an unexpected voice for a forsaken people: those who grow the food that sustains us.

Learn more about Farmsteaders and explore additional resources about the film and filmmakers at: https://www.pbs.org/pov/farmsteaders/

AUDIENCE

• Middle and High School Afterschool Programs
• College Agricultural Programs
• Community Gardens

I am one of them. I grew up on a homestead in rural Ohio, the heartland of America – a kid of homesteaders, reinventing their suburban lives: raising hogs, growing heirloom tomatoes, defying the expectations. As I transitioned into adolescence, I watched as one after another our neighboring farms were forced to sell. The land grew fallow until it was either completely forgotten or turned into sprawling suburbs, full of cheaply built houses, with cupboards and refrigerators full of cheaply made food. It crushed something in me. My twenties were a spiritual quest to document humanity’s entangled relationship to the land.

When I began filming the Nolans in 2011, it felt like home. As the project developed, I made a conscious choice to continue filming solo to maintain a quiet, unobtrusive presence with the Nolan family. This approach allowed me to film the intimate, unguarded moments: Nick sick in bed, Celeste crying as she reaches her breaking point, the kids lost in their play and wonder. Throughout filming, they knew that I understood the weight of the struggles, as well as the bliss in between. With ease, we talked farming and factories, beauty and loss. They trusted me to understand and to translate the nuances of their lifestyle, their sacred relationship to the land, and their Sisyphean effort to survive as a small sustainable farm in today’s corporate climate.

Only one percent of Americans are farmers. Our food industry is largely insidious and unethical, built as an extractive industry chock full of human, animal and environmental rights issues. Many Americans are nostalgic for the farms that live in their childhood memories but are unaware of how tenuous our food system actually is. Layer that misunderstanding of rural America on top of our current political climate, and you end up with an uninformed and narrow view of the majority of the country. This story is the antithesis of the exhausted “Trump country” narrative. Nick and Celeste’s meditations on life, legacy, and resistance offer an unexpected voice at a time when the country is so deeply divided. With much of the current rift falling along demographic lines, there is an escalating clash between the two Americas. And yet here this family stands in contrast to all of our expectations – heroic, benign, accessible.

This is a story about my home as much as theirs. And it’s the story of many Americans straining against the ebb and flow of an uncertain economic system. I made this film to exalt the farmer, to challenge the stereotype, to celebrate the working class hero – the one who fights for sovereignty of labor and mind.

Sheana Mallett, Director

Berry, Wendell. The Mad Farmer Poems. CounterPoint Press, 2014.

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “Mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he’s found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts.

Kurlansky, Mark. Milk! Bloomsbury, 2018.

Today, milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization. Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.

Dougherty, Beth. The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016.

Twenty years ago, when authors Shawn and Beth Dougherty purchased the land they would come to name the Sow’s Ear, the state of Ohio designated it “not suitable for agriculture.” Today, their family raises and grows 90% of their own food. The Independent Farmstead is a resource for new and prospective farmers and homesteaders.

Kimball, Kristen. The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love. Scribner/Simon and Schuster, 2010.

When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn. Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm.

Horn, Miriam. Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland.W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Unfolding as a journey down the Mississippi River, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman tells the stories of five representatives of this stewardship movement: a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman. In exploring their work and family histories and the essential geographies they protect, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman challenges pervasive and powerful myths about American and environmental values.

Logdon, Gene. Letter to a Young Farmer: How to Live Richly Without Wealth on the New Garden Farm. Princeton Architectural Press, 2017.

For more than four decades, the self-described “contrary farmer” and writer Gene Logsdon has commented on the state of American agriculture. In Letter to a Young Farmer, his final book of essays, Logsdon addresses the next generation―young people who are moving back to the land to enjoy a better way of life as small-scale “garden farmers.” It’s a lifestyle that isn’t defined by accumulating wealth or by the “get big or get out” agribusiness mindset. Instead, it’s one that recognizes the beauty of nature, cherishes the land, respects our fellow creatures, and values rural traditions. It’s one that also looks forward and embraces “right technologies,” including new and innovative ways of working smarter, not harder, and avoiding premature burnout.

Mondello beach, for me and for everyone who lives in Palermo, is much more than a holiday resort. It is an institution, a refuge, a milestone.

Sicilian teenagers see Mondello as a mirage and a place to conquer, a place where happy, smiling, festive and wealthy men and women get together to breeze carefree through the summer. In the summer of 2000, a group of friends and I decided to occupy a Mondello beach hut that was still available to see what really went on there.

The world I found did not betray my expectations, but the dream quickly ended when, after an inspection by the beach staff, we were thrown out. I was left with a strong sensation of something unaccomplished and of bitterness. This motivation connects the hut to my past and became the mainspring for making Buon Inverno (Happy Winter).

Happy Winter was above all my graduation thesis at the National Film School, the Sicilian branch, which specializes in creative documentaries. Thanks to it, I returned to Mondello, where I began to understand a great deal about the beachgoers. That’s when my idea to develop my first full-length feature arose.

The summer of 2014 spent in Mondello was crucial to winning people’s trust and becoming a part of that micro-world of cabins and summer rituals. The following year I spent the summer searching for the main characters of my documentary.

The dynamics that will be the central thread of my narration emerged from life on the beach. My characters are mostly from middle-class families who have been passing on the huts from generation to generation ever since the sixties, the years of the Italian economic boom. But today, they are experiencing a radical change in spending due to the economic crisis that has assailed not only Sicily, but Italy as a whole and the entire Western world.

Their stories describe their longing to carry on appearing wealthy and beautiful during the holidays despite the economic crisis.

This summer ritual, the symbol of economic wellbeing, sees the possession of a cabin as a form of redemption for the middle class, which doesn’t want to change its habits and prefers living with the crisis amusing themselves rather than relinquishing the goals they once obtained. This behavior reflects the contradictions of Western countries, which find it hard to accept living standards inferior to those of the previous generation in a consumer society where being equals possession.

Mondello’s carefree holiday atmosphere represents a suspension from the toils of the winter and this condition is an opportunity for me to face the subject with an ironic, fizzy and at times comical approach, but never superficially, thanks to the various interpretative levels the characters present. They have quite literally lost their shirts and lay bare their socio-existential condition, which isn’t too different from that of someone from Spain, Greece, France or North America.

At the narrative level, in the first part I deal with the characters’ appearance: the efforts of the three main ones are directed at creating the self-image they want to give the world and culminate in the big August 15 party. Then, through careful observation and my experience of the micro world of the huts, I manage to live from the inside a deep confrontation between them, collecting secrets they confide to each other, delving into their authentic lives and difficulties.

In the final chapter, once spectators are fully plunged inside the bittersweet atmosphere of the huts, hope returns with a note of naïve but absolutely sincere positive thinking: the group organizes a massive collection to buy a huge quantity of scratch cards in the hope of solving their problems with the intervention of fortune.

The years spent in Mondello helped me to get to know the people there and become familiar with the environment, to be able to predict any technical problems caused by the atmospheric agents and the beach itself (noise, sand, wind).

My idea as director is to relate the beachgoers to the space of the cabin, a limited one but also full of narrative elements. For the characters, the hut becomes the villa they can’t afford, the status symbol capable of making them feel wealthier and more powerful.

Observation has been the crucial element of the years I spent approaching the stories and will remain the dominant style of the film, allowing me to approach the characters, capture their gestures and expressions, without being too invasive.

A register consisting of static shots, combining formal accuracy and continuously new narrative contents, will alternate with a moving camera, a freer camera capturing visual moments associated to the sea. Underwater shooting represents the sea as the territory of fantasy and dreams, the element the characters retreat to from time to time.

Spectacular drone shots will introduce the beach environment at the beginning and at the end of the film, first to discover the huts world while it is built at the beginning, and to exit the beach at the end.

—Giovanni Totaro, Writer and Director, Happy Winter

Boris, Eileen, and Jennifer Klein. Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State. Oxford University Press, 2012

In this sweeping narrative history from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of today, Caring for Americarethinks both the history of the American welfare state from the perspective of care work and chronicles how home care workers eventually became one of the most vibrant forces in the American labor movement. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein demonstrate the ways in which law and social policy made home care a low-waged job that was stigmatized as welfare and relegated to the bottom of the medical hierarchy.

Butler, Katy. Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.Scribner, 2013

Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven's Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Its provocative thesis is that technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. It also chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the "Good Deaths" our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is inspiring passionate conversations about lighting the path to a better way of death.

Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010

The United States faces a growing crisis in care. The number of people needing care is growing while the ranks of traditional caregivers have shrunk. The status of care workers is a critical concern. Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers’ compensation. Glenn reveals how assumptions about gender, family, home, civilization, and citizenship have shaped the development of care labor and been incorporated into law and social policies. She exposes the underlying systems of control that have resulted in women—especially immigrants and women of color—performing a disproportionate share of caring labor. Finally, she examines strategies for improving the situation of unpaid family caregivers and paid home healthcare workers.

Gross, Jane. A Bittersweet Season: Caring for our Aging Parents—and Ourselves. Vintage Books, 2012.

When Jane Gross found herself suddenly thrust into a caretaker role for her eighty-five year-old mother, she was forced to face challenges that she had never imagined. As she and her younger brother struggled to move her mother into an assisted living facility, deal with seemingly never-ending costs, and adapt to the demands on her time and psyche, she learned valuable and important lessons.

Mace, Nancy L. The 36-hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Other Dementias, and Memory Loss.Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

When someone in your family suffers from Alzheimer's disease or other related memory loss diseases, both you and your loved one face immense challenges. For over thirty years, this book has been the trusted bible for families affected by dementia disorders. Now completely revised and updated, this guide features the latest information on the causes of dementia, managing the early stages of dementia, the prevention of dementia, and finding appropriate living arrangements for the person who has dementia when home care is no longer an option.

Nuland, Sherwin B. How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter. Vintage Books, 1995.

A runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner, Sherwin Nuland's How We Die has become the definitive text on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. This new edition includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the current state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. It also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.

Rinpoche, Sogyal. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.Harper San Francisco, 1994.

Written by the Buddhist meditation master and popular international speaker Sogyal Rinpoche, this highly acclaimed book clarifies the majestic vision of life and death that underlies the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It includes not only a lucid, inspiring and complete introduction to the practice of meditation, but also advice on how to care for the dying with love and compassion, and how to bring them help of a spiritual kind. But there is much more besides in this classic work, which was written to inspire all who read it to begin the journey to enlightenment and so become 'servants of peace'.

Drake, Phillip. Indonesia and the Politics of Disaster: Power and Representation in Indonesia’s Mud Volcano.Routledge, 2016.
Named after Lapindo Brantas, a gas exploration company that was drilling at the eruption site, the Lapindo mudflow initially burst in 2006 and continues to flow today, becoming the most expensive disaster in Indonesia’s history. Using this environmental incident in Indonesia as a case study, this book explores representations of disaster in scientific reports, public discourse, literature, and other cultural forms, observing the impact of these portrayals on the ways people both understand and respond to complicated environmental disasters.

Gold, Russell. The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World. Simon and Schuster, 2014.
A narrative history, The Boom follows the dramatic development and adoption of fracking technology. It is a thrilling journey filled with colorful characters: the Texas oilman who created the first modern frack; a bare-knuckled Oklahoman natural gas empire-builder who gave the world an enormous new supply of energy and was brought down by his own success and excesses; an environmental leader whose embrace of fracking brought an end to his public career; and an aging fracking pioneer who is now trying to save the industry from itself.

Pisani, Elizabeth. Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Declaring Independence in 1945, Indonesia said it would “work out the details of the transfer of power etc. as soon as possible.” With over 300 ethnic groups spread across over 13,500 islands, the world’s fourth most populous nation has been working on that “etc.” ever since. Author Elizabeth Pisani traveled 26,000 miles in search of the links that bind this disparate nation.

Parry, Richard Lloyd. In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos.Grove Press, 2005.
In the last years of the twentieth century, longtime journalist Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious, and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years, it had been paralyzed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto, but now the age of Suharto was coming to an end.

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long as Grass Grows: the Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press, 2019.
The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism. Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.

The Distant Barking of Dogs by Simon Lereng Wilmont

Filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary follows 10-year-old Oleg over a year, witnessing the gradual erosion of his innocence beneath the pressures of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Oleg lives with his beloved grandmother Alexandra in the small village of Hnutove. Having no other place to go, Oleg and Alexandra stay as others leave the village. Life becomes increasingly difficult with each passing day, and there is no end to the war in sight.

In the now half-deserted village, Oleg and Alexandra are the only true constants in each other’s lives, and the film shows both how fragile such close relationships are and how crucial they are for survival. Through Oleg’s perspective, the film examines what it means to grow up in a war zone. It portrays how a child’s struggle to discover the world is intertwined with all the dangers and challenges the war presents.

The Distant Barking of Dogs unveils the consequences of war bearing down on the children in eastern Ukraine and, by natural extension, the scars and life lessons this generation will carry with them into the future.

The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer

When the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military in 1965, small-time gangster Anwar Congo and his friends helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals. Some nations with histories of similar crimes against humanity have created truth and reconciliation initiatives and even jailed perpetrators. In Indonesia, the perpetrators are still in power, and death squad members are honored for their patriotism.

In a mind-bending twist, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer and his Indonesian co-director (who remains anonymous for his own safety) offer Anwar and his “crew” a chance to tell their story in any way they choose. Their choice: to dramatize their brutal deeds in the style of the American westerns, musicals and gangster movies they love—with themselves as the stars. The result is a nightmarish vision of a banal culture of impunity in which killers joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows.

For more information on the film and additional background on the 1965 Indonesian genocide, download the Discussion Guide for The Act of Killing.

On Her Shoulders by Alexandria Bombach

Twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad’s life is a dizzying array of exhausting undertakings—from giving testimony before the United Nations to visiting refugee camps to bearing her soul in media interviews and one-on-one meetings with top government officials. Repeating her traumatic story to the world, this ordinary young woman finds herself thrust onto the international stage as the voice of her people.

In On Her Shoulders, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach follows this strong-willed young woman, who survived the 2014 genocide of the Yazidis in Northern Iraq and escaped the hands of ISIS to become a relentless beacon of hope for her people, even though at times she longs to set aside this monumental burden and simply lead an ordinary life.

For more information on the film and additional background on the 2014 Yazidi genocide, download the Discussion Guide for On Her Shoulders.

In my two previous films, I followed children who lived in very safe worlds. Their lives got knocked out of balance temporarily, and in the films we followed them in their individual struggles to get back on their feet again, growing wiser from the experience. That made me think about what it would be like if the situation was completely turned upside down: How does a child find safety and security in a chaotic world?

In The Distant Barking of Dogs, I follow 10-year-old Oleg, who lives with his grandma in a warzone in the eastern part of Ukraine, less than one mile from the frontline. I spent time in the area researching, and I remember the first time I met Oleg. He immediately stood out. I asked if he could describe how it felt to be scared. He looked at me and without hesitation said, “It feels like a hand reaching in and grabbing my heart. When the first explosions sound, after the cannons have fired, the hand starts squeezing my heart. Then it gets all little and cold, too.” It was then I knew I had found my main subject.

Soon afterward, I met his grandmother, Alexandra, an amazing, loving and strong woman. It was obvious how close and special the bond between the two of them was. Their house still showed signs of shelling and desperately needed repairs, but it was filled with warmth and laughter. A lot of the people in the village had been displaced, including many close friends and relatives, leaving behind a vacuum of activity where time did not exist. But there was always a warm meal ready and a good story waiting to be shared in their house. Life was calm and beautiful, as it should be. For a second, you almost forgot about the war. Staying there long enough, though, I soon realized that this bubble of safety was just an illusion. A brittle illusion that could shatter violently and often unexpectedly to reveal the very real and dangerous world that Oleg and Alexandra really live in.

The film is about how people deal with the cracks in that illusion and about the human drive we have to survive no matter what. How, even amidst the most impossible circumstances, we build illusory worlds for ourselves in which we can find comfort and warmth, because we can't exist for long in chaos. Even when the illusion is demolished over and over again, we still keep building it back up again. That kind of tenacity is incredibly beautiful to me.

I am also reminded of the importance of the people who surround us by the mutual dependency that Oleg and his grandmother have developed. They share a love for each other. Without one, the other would collapse. They live in two different worlds. His world is immediate: he reacts to what happens and quickly suppresses the bad things. She, on the other hand, knows that the things yet to come can have terrible consequences for them. In the film, Alexandra shelters Oleg from the big, bad world around him for as long as she can. That's what makes it possible for him to be a child long enough to give her the joy and strength that she needs to survive and keep up hope.

—Simon Lereng Wilmont

Director, The Distant Barking of Dogs

Blackmon, Douglas A.Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.Random House, 2008.
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter.

Feimster, Crystal.Southern Horrors: Women and The Politics of Rape and Lynching. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Pairing the lives of two Southern women—Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded lynching a white tool of political terror against southern blacks, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching black men accused of raping white women—Feimster makes visible the ways in which black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South. While Wells was black and Felton was white, both were journalists, temperance women, suffragists, and anti-rape activists. By placing their concerns at the center of southern politics, Feimster illuminates a critical and novel aspect of southern racial and sexual dynamics. Despite being on opposite sides of the lynching question, both Wells and Felton sought protection from sexual violence and political empowerment for women.
Giddings, Paula.Ida: A Sword Among Lions. Amistad, 2009.
Heralded as a landmark achievement upon publication, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching—a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race. At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born to slaves in Mississippi, Wells began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign against lynching. For Wells, the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men, but also about women and sexuality. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero—as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death.
Goldsby, Jacqueline.A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature.The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America’s national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity.
Ifill, Sherrilyn A.On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century.Rev ed. with foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Beacon Press, 2018.
Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill’s On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious.
Leamer, Laurence.The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan. William Morrow, 2016.
Based on numerous interviews and extensive archival research, The Lynching brings to life two dramatic trials, during which the Alabama Klan’s motives and philosophy were exposed for the evil they represent. In addition to telling a gripping and consequential story, Laurence Leamer chronicles the KKK and its activities in the second half of the twentieth century, and illuminates its lingering effect on race relations in America today.
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.3rd ed., Equal Justice Initiative, 2015.
Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity.
McGovern, James R.Anatomy of a Lynching: the Killing of Claude Neal. Rev. ed. with foreword by Manfred Berg, Louisiana State University Press, 2014.
First published in 1982, James R. McGovern’s Anatomy of a Lynching unflinchingly reconstructs the grim events surrounding the death of Claude Neal, one of the estimated three thousand blacks who died at the hands of southern lynch mobs in the six decades between the 1880s and the outbreak of World War II.
Metress, Christopher.The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. University of Virginia Press, 2002.
With a collection of more than one hundred documents spanning almost half a century, Christopher Metress retells Till’s story in a unique and daring way. Juxtaposing news accounts and investigative journalism with memoirs, poetry, and fiction, this documentary narrative not only includes material by such prominent figures as Hodding Carter, Chester Himes, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, John Edgar Wideman, Lewis Nordan, and Michael Eric Dyson, but it also contains several previously unpublished works—among them a newly discovered Langston Hughes poem—and a generous selection of hard-to-find documents never before collected.
Mitchell, Koritha.Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans.
Stevenson, Bryan.Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.Spiegel & Grau, 2014.
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
Ore, Ersula J. Lynching:Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity.University Press of Mississippi, 2019.
Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.
Shin, Sun Yung, ed.A Good Time for Truth: Race in Minnesota.Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016.
In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota’s best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in Minnesota. They give readers a splendid gift: the gift of touching another human being’s inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness. They bring us generously into experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships. Minnesota communities struggle with some of the nation’s worst racial disparities. As its authors confront and consider the realities that lie beneath the numbers, this book provides an important tool to those who want to be part of closing those gaps.
Wideman, John Edgar.Writing to Save a Life. 1st ed., Scribner, 2016.
In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later, he returned, dead; allegedly, he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett’s story is known, there’s a dark side note that’s rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett’s father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice.
Wilkerson, Isabel.The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Random House, 2010.
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great-untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi.Between the World and Me. Penguin Random House, 2015.
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.