Creating Political Community Around Film
Building social connections around our shared politics is core to our movement. And just as there are social clubs, book groups and a host of other gatherings that allow people to make politics part of their every day lives, there is an increasing number of film clubs that share their politics while they share their love of cinema. This roundtable discussion looks at the effective ways of organizing these communities and how to turn reel action into real action.
Wendy Cohen is the Manager of Community and Alliances at Participant Media in Los Angeles. In February 2006, she co-founded Screening Liberally and is currently the National Director and part of the National Leadership of Living Liberally. Later that year, she became the first Community Manager at the Huffington Post. Wendy produced her first short documentary film about bees in 2008 which was hailed as a “better bee movie” by New York Magazine and has received awards from the Clif Bar Family Foundation and W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
Tracy Fleischman is a producer, communications strategist and co-Founder of The Cultural Front: Marketing and Media. Tracy has created media and strategy for non-profits and political organizations including Courage Campaign, California Democratic Party and California Teachers Association and for documentaries like Oscar-nominee TROUBLE THE WATER and Emmy-winner MADE IN L.A. During 2008, Tracy produced an election town hall series for The Media Consortium called LIVE FROM MAIN STREET, reaching nine million viewers. Tracy previously worked as Communications Director for Brave New Films and as a producer for Balcony Films where she created media for Women's Voices Women Vote and ACORN.
Jacob Soboroff is Executive Director of Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan group working to increase voter participation. In addition to his work with Why Tuesday?, for which he received a 2008 Los Angeles Press Club National Entertainment Journalism Award, a Film Your Issue Award and a Webby nomination, he contributes vlogs to NPR Weekend Edition Sunday's political blog, Sunday Soapbox. Jacob was a contributor to the PBS and WIRED magazine series WIRED Science. He an MA in political theory and philosophy from NYU.
Jim Gilliam is the founder of 3dna, making internet tools like act.ly, GovLuv, and pro.act.ly to shake up a broken political system. He co-founded Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films, building a non-profit grassroots media powerhouse of a million members. In the late 90's, he launched Business.com as its Chief Technology Officer, and worked at Lycos, one of the first internet search engines. Gilliam produced four documentaries, and was honored in 2008 with Take Back America’s second annual Maria Leavey Tribute Award. His work has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and the Washington Post. Jim fought cancer twice, and is the enormously grateful recipient of a bone marrow transplant and a double lung transplant.
