In Development

30 Mosques/30 Days follows the quirky cross-country road trip of two Muslim-American twenty-somethings over the course of Ramadan 2011, as they visit a different mosque in a different state every night for 30 days. Bassam Tariq and Aman Ali seek the freedom of the open road, hoping to leave their insecurities at home in New York. But they journey into the most divided America they have ever known, and unwittingly become ambassadors for America’s most contested citizens. Part road trip movie and part new media experiment, 30 Mosques/30 Days challenges our young heroes and audiences with a journey along the boundaries of pluralism to the heart of America.

The U.S. is the most religiously diverse nation on earth. The community of Detroit is rich with stories of everyday people grappling with the reality of pluralism, especially religious pluralism. Filmmaker Maria Finitzo will capture how individuals confront the appearance of a stranger, and ultimately come to accept the stranger as one who will not only stay, but belongs as well.

Anak Selatae (Son of the South) follows the journey into manhood of several young Malay-Muslims from the troubled province of Pattani in southern Thailand. Every year, the young men, who work as low-wage migrants in neighboring Malaysia, return home to their village. This time they are being called back for the annual military draft. The draft holds a bitter irony: they are being asked to sacrifice their lives for a country that has failed to include them as Muslims and ethnic Malays in its vision of a monolithic Buddhist Thai culture.

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with nine million new members a year. Pentecostal churches in South Korea, Brazil and South Africa share a common trait: they can trace their roots back to a two-story, white-washed building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles where, in the early 1900's, an unlikely congregation of blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians gave birth to a religious revival that would sweep the globe.

In Morocco, a quiet social revolution is underway.  Women are working as official Muslim leaders for the first time.  Attached to mosques and neighborhoods throughout the country, this new generation of spiritual guides, known as the Morchidat, are using the teachings of Islam to change the conditions and attitudes that foster extremism.

What makes a Jew?  In the oft-quoted rabbinic source “Ethics of the Fathers,” the three pillars of Judaism are earmarked as prayer, study, and gemilut hasidim, or acts of loving kindness.  But there’s a fourth pillar – Food...A tender cut of corned beef steeped in its juices.  A full-bodied garlic pickle.  Spicy brown mustard with grain.  A blintz that melts in your mouth like a creamsicle on a summer’s day.   Recipes and culinary garnishes from Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Romania. Meet the effusive and charming Ziggy Gruber, a third-generation delicatessen man, owner and maven, as well as Yiddish-speaking French-trained chef, who currently operates one of the country’s most popular, and delicious delis, Kenney and Ziggy’s in Houston.  ‘Texas?’ you ask.  Shalom, y’all.

Dying at Peace takes a thoughtful look at the best information available about our “final hour” and what lies beyond.

Director David Kennard plans to follow as a “compassionate witness” four terminally ill individuals, their caregivers and families through death and into the week following death. The four individuals will be chosen for their contrasting belief in the afterlife.

Egypt Fever Dream takes viewers on an incredible journey through the most tumultuous, inspiring events in our young century.  But this film is not a document of the revolution.  Rather, it is a character-driven story about the timeless, universal desire of young people for freedom ... not a story about the revolution, but what the revolution is about.

What is it like to be a citizen of a country that guarantees freedom of religion, yet continually throws up barriers to practicing the religion of your choice?  To be part of a religious minority where the culture is suffused by the majority religion?  Free to Worship will explore these questions by portraying two religious communities, a Muslim mosque in the U.S. and a Coptic Christian church in Egypt.

The Catholic religious organization Opus Dei has long been a subject of public fascination.  Its supporters say that it has reinvigorated Catholicism, by showing ordinary men and women how they can achieve holiness in their everyday lives.  In 2002, Pope John Paul II declared the group’s founder, the Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva, to be a saint.

But Opus Dei has also been a lightning rod for controversy. It has been accused of being ultra-secretive, highly influential and overly regimented and overzealous in its recruiting practices. Perhaps most controversial has been the fact that Opus Dei requires its celibate members to practice corporal mortification.
 
For the first time, Opus Dei has agreed to cooperate with director Kenneth Mandel in a biographical film of Opus Dei’s founder, who lived from 1902 to 1975.

When you’ve grown up all over the world, can you ever really go home again? Home Again takes an intimate look at the struggles of evangelical Missionary Kids, whose childhoods have taken them around the globe.  Director Julie Englander follows them as they navigate their identity as Americans, as believers, and as adults. Their passports say that they are citizens of the United States, but at times the U.S. can seem like the strangest country of all.

Many films have addressed Jewish-Christian relationships during the World War II era from the Jewish perspective.  Director Erin Reese tells the story of The Jewess from the perspective of a Christian German American.  It’s about a Jew saving Germans, not Germans saving Jews.

Monks and Muslims: Finding Faith in Algeria will focus on a community of French Trappist monks for whom faith and good works mattered more than theology and ritual. Surrounded by war and terror that consumed Algeria in the 1990s, the monks showed inspiring spirit and courage, fighting for the lives of beleaguered Muslims as they put their own lives at risk.

The New Black delves into the complicated interwoven histories of the African American church and the LGBT civil rights movement.   Homophobia in the black church, an institutional pillar of the black community, is at the root of much soul-searching within the black community and between the black community and LGBT communities. The New Black asks how and why it is that some powerful members of the black church, which has historically been the center of the civil rights movement, advocate to deny another minority’s rights.

Nobody Should Know tells the stories of three courageous Orthodox Jews, forced by the customs of their community to keep their life-threatening illness, the genetic disease cystic fibrosis, a secret not only from the community but also from many of their loved ones.

Filmmaker Geeta Patel turns her camera in this comedic documentary on arranged marriages in the Hindu community in the U.S.A. She follows her brother Ravi, who wrestles with his American upbringing and his dawning desire to seek an arranged marriage, as his parents send him around the country to meet potential Hindu wives.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati captivates seekers from India to Pennsylvania to Oman.  A traditional eighty-year old monk dressed in saffron robes, Dayananda deftly weaves sophisticated philosophical concepts and methods for discovering emotional maturity with storytelling, humor, and insights into pop culture. One Without a Second is set in a remote forest ashram in Tamil Nadu, India.  An international community of students gathers there to listen to Dayananda as he unfolds the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, the Indian philosophical tradition of non-duality.The tradition is in the midst of radical changes as it encounters modernity and changing social structures in India.  Filmmakers Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal follow the next generation of students as they navigate the austere intensity of monastic life and discover the core wisdom of Vedanta that transcends its cultural and religious forms.

This documentary investigates the growth of a the Patriot Riders movement as the viewer travels with these motorcyclists on a solemn journey to funerals of young soldiers killed in action. Patriot Riders was originally formed to protect grieving families from members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who gather at military funerals to harass families for allowing their sons and daughters to serve. The film reveals an unlikely but powerful spiritual bond between the riders and the grieving families.

Prayer follows award-winning filmmaker Jonathan Skurnik on his quest to understand the power of prayer and its dynamic role in social change. Skurnik plans to roam the country seeking the secrets behind how spiritual leaders have used prayer to affect change in the world around us.

The Psalm of Howard Thurman will bring to life the story of a remarkable individual. Howard Thurman established the nation's first interracial, intercultural and interfaith congregation and advocated tirelessly for community among disparate races and faiths. He collaborated with religious leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, and played an inspirational and pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement.

This two-hour documentary focuses on how the medical profession is not only looking to the origins of medicine in order to move forward, by re-integrating religiously based tenets into the healing process, but also responding to contemporary research findings that support earlier accepted wisdom.

Today there are but 15,000 Jews living in Poland, down from more than four million in 1939. After World War II, Poland’s few remaining Jews hid their identity from children and grandchildren. With the fall of Communism in 1989, a young generation of Jews in Poland began learning of their long-buried ancestry. The Return tells their story by following four women in their 20’s who discovered they were Jewish in their teens, and are now strong, dynamic leaders in their nascent Jewish enclaves.

The feature rockumentary Rock n' Roll Rabbis takes viewers on a musical journey into the little-known world of Orthodox rock, profiling religious Jews who reconcile the asceticism of Orthodox Judaism with a rock n' roll lifestyle. This intimate portrait focuses on four of the most prominent rock n' roll acts, as the camera follows these religious individuals backstage, into the studio, and finally on Yidstock, an international tour.

In ancient cultures throughout the world, Shamans have traditionally been guardians of family values and the environment.

In Shamans: Healing Our World, director Marianna Yarovskaya tells their stories, and records their wisdom, teachings and insights as she journeys to some of the few remaining ecologically pure places remaining on the globe: The Altai region of Russia, Yunnan province of China, jungles of Peru and remote areas of Indonesia.

Streetcar to Calcutta follows writer Fatima Shaik, who is Christian and African American, on a cinematic journey from New Orleans, the city of her birth, to Calcutta, the birthplace of the Muslim grandfather she never knew.  Her Christian African American family has lived in Louisiana for four generations.  Her Muslim Bengali grandfather left India and settled in New Orleans in 1893 and married Tennie Ford, an African American Catholic. Traveling from New Orleans to Calcutta across geographical, spiritual and cultural borders, Fatima Shaik will become acquainted with Islam in daily life and investigate what Muslims in India associate with Christianity.  It is a story of Christianity and Islam, America and India, New Orleans and Calcutta.

Ten years ago, filmmakers Tricia Regan and Jenifer McShane documented a grassroots movement of parents and teachers in Northern Ireland bent on integrating Catholic and Protestant school children. Their film was nominated for an Academy Award and was seen around the world. In Time for Peace, Regan and McShane will return to Northern Ireland to evaluate the success of this movement, locating the families who sent their children across battle lines a decade ago to forge a community of peace and now face the challenges as adults of violence and conflict that won't go away.

The Episcopal Church is wrestling with a "divisive issue of inclusion," which arose following a 2003 vote to install the Rev. Gene Robinson, a gay clergyman living in a committed relationship, as Bishop of New Hampshire. Award-winning filmmakers Cal Skaggs and Tom Hurwitz plan to explore in Torn Asunder the nature, causes and effects of a potential split over this issue of homosexuality in mainline Protestantism by profiling how the issue is being addressed in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, the largest in membership and one of the two oldest in the nation, and the diocese in which protests against homosexuality have been most vocal, most active, and most effective.

Lifta is the only remaining Arab village depopulated in Israel's 1948 War of Independence that has not been completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews.  Lifta's Arab heritage, architecture and history are about to be erased by Jerusalem's municipality that plans to build more than 250 luxury villas, shops and a hotel on this site.  An international coalition that includes Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews is trying to stop this development and preserve Lifta as a place of memory, of respect, and, hopefully, of reconciliation.

Valentino's Ghost takes viewers on a chronological journey through more than a century of images of Muslims, Arabs and Islam in the U.S. media, from the early-20th-century fantasies of romantic sheiks and golden palaces to today's portrayals of fanatics.

A muezzin calls Islamic worshippers to prayer from the minaret of a mosque five times a day, in a 1,400-year-old tradition called the adhan. In Cairo, a city of 4,000 mosques, that tradition is about to disappear. The Egyptian government approved a proposal to systematize the call to prayer. Under this plan, set to go into effect in 2010, the adhan will be reduced to a single recording of one muezzin reciting the adhan, which will then be broadcast throughout the city using wireless receivers. The filmmakers plan to document and honor the tradition of the adhan before it ceases to exist.

The Church of Gethsemane is a special Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) located in Brooklyn, NY. It is run by and for prisoners, ex-prisoners, their families, and individuals in partnership with the poor and imprisoned. Gethsemane's story is one of mutual transformation, both of ex-prisoners and of individuals from mainstream churches who have risked personal involvement with them. Walk With Me will explore how a community like Gethsemane manifests not only the mission of the Presbyterian denomination, but also the principles at the heart of all faiths that value equality and justice.

William Sloane Coffin: A Life will examine in-depth the life and legacy of the brilliant, ebullient and now legendary former chaplain of Yale University and senior minister of Riverside Church in New York. Gibney will paint a portrait of the man and the minister, and "track his progress from 'great man' - leader, orator, advocate for change and justice - to 'wonderful man' -who later in life became full of wonder about the world around him."