Land of Opportunity

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Images

Al Aubry, Urban Gardener

Tr'vel Lyons, Displaced Resident

Andres Duany, Urban Planner

Kawana Jasper, Public Housing Resident

Vanessa Gueringer, Community Activist

Marcio Passos, Immigrant Worker

Budget

Raised to date: $ 337,587.00
Estimate to complete: $ 137,816.00
Total Estimated Budget: $ 475,403.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 03/03/2010

Status

Post Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Other: tv, web, mobile devices, game

Key Personnel

Luisa Dantas
Producer/Director/Editor
Luisa Dantas has worked in film and television production as a writer, director and producer on a wide-range of different projects from short films and documentaries to pre-school television programs in both her native Brazil and the U.S.. She pursues documentary filmmaking in order to meld art with social justice. She co-produced the acclaimed documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. She also directed and produced the web-series Voices From the Gulf, for Color of Change. St. Joe, Luisa’s experimental short video about the demolition of public housing in New Orleans, recently won Best Short at the New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.

In addition to her documentary work, Luisa is a screenwriter and director of narrative films. Luisa’s first film, Bolo, was produced and shot in Brazil, and screened in several international festivals. She also received a grant from Disney/ABC to develop a Summertime, a screenplay about a young Latina coming of age at an exclusive New York private school. She has also a written for the pre-school series Go, Diego, Go! for Nickelodeon Television. Luisa is currently adapting the book Desire Street, by Pulitzer-prize winning author Jed Horne, into a screenplay. Luisa received her B.A. in English and Latin American studies from Brown University. She also received an M.F.A in Film from Columbia University.

Rebecca Snedeker
Co-Producer
Rebecca Snedeker is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker whose work supports human rights, creative expression and her native city, New Orleans. Her directorial debut, By Invitation Only (2006), premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and screened at festivals, conferences and PBS stations nationwide. Currently, she is co-producing Land of Opportunity and producing Choices, featuring Terence Blanchard and Dr. Cornel West, and Siskel/Jacobs Productions’ Witness: Katrina (National Geographic Channel, 2010). As Archival Researcher and/or Associate Producer, she has contributed to numerous documentaries including A Village Called Versailles (Independent Lens, 2010) and Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans (National PBS Broadcast, 2007). Snedeker serves on the boards of the New Orleans Film Society, Patois: the New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival and Video Veracity, a fiscal agent for independent media projects. She is an active member of New Day Films, the filmmaker-owned distribution company, and a Visiting Scholar at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University. Snedeker received her B.A. in Fine Arts from Wesleyan University.

Chicken and Egg Pictures (Judith Helfand, Wendy Ettinger, Julie Benello)
Executive Producers
Aggregating over twenty years of collective expertise as producers, mentors, social-justice donors, advocates and practitioners of rigorous impact-driven audience engagement campaigns, Julie Parker-Benello, Wendy Ettinger and Judith Helfand co-founded Chicken and Egg Pictures in 2005. Themselves award-winning non-fiction producers/directors (The War Room/’93, A Healthy Baby Girl/’97, Blue Vinyl/’02, Everything’s Cool/’07, Hotel Gramercy Park/’08) they came together to create this responsive and dynamic venture.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY is not only meant to entertain, but also to galvanize viewers into action on the issues presented in the film. With the guidance of Working Films and our Executive Producer Judith Helfand, we are developing a comprehensive audience engagement, outreach and social media strategy. We believe that there is going to be a tremendous amount of organizing going on over the summer of 2010 in cities that like New Orleans,have, will, or are experiencing some form of crisis. We are developing interactive web-based content that is meant to capitalize on that energy and momentum. We have a wealth of material amassed over a period of over four years that this summer of engagement will leverage, using the resonance of the upcoming 5th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The basic message to urban dwellers is that your storm may be coming, and you must take charge of it.

We plan to release web-based content from the LAND OF OPPORTUNITY project in serial form beginning in the Summer of 2010. This strategy is called LAND OF OPPORTUNITY: Summer of the City. It will take place for six weeks, July 18 - August 29, 2010. We will build an audience that receives, watches and responds to six weekly installments of approximately 15-20 minutes in length. If we secure a broadcast, this web-based content will be complementary to the feature-length film, but will not duplicate it. If we do not secure a traditional broadcast, the feature length film will be re-edited to accomodate a serial format. Viewers who subscribe to theweb-based content will have opportunities to respond to he material by uploading their own videos, or posting responses on a blog and social networking sites.

AUDIENCE, PARTNERSHIPS, ACTIONS:

To achieve the overarching goal of making LAND OF OPPORTUNITY a tool for community organizing, we will partner with six community-based social justice organizations (see below) to work in six strategic cities that are experiencing issues around disaster preparedness and recovery, affordable housing, economic displacement and immigration. Potential cities include Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, Miami and New York (with New Orleans as the sixth city). Our partners will use content from LAND OF OPPORTUNITY to develop and implement six community action campaigns (one introduced in a different city each Sunday)designed to mobilize their constituents around local causes. These six weeks of action will culminate on the week August 29, 2010 when we plan to hold simultaneous screening events in the chosen cities. We also hope to organize a day of mass action that will occur on that week around a national policy initiative. For example, we could partner with an organization like Policylink to use the story of Vanessa Gueringer, the community organizer featured in LAND OF OPPORTUNITY who fights to represent her Lower 9th Ward community in the rebuilding process, to inspire dialogue and action around an inclusionary zoning campaign in Oakland, CA. Then on the week of the 5th Anniversary, there could be a national call to action to support legislation like the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act. Thus the stories from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region serve as a jumping off point, designed to begin a dialogue around these issues in communities from coast to coast.

Each new installment and its accompanying additional content will be launched on a Sunday, a good day for reflection and for press. The project will serve to gather the diaspora of evacuees and former residents in a virtual community of viewers, rebuilding community overtime. Summer camps, books clubs, year-round public schools, and faith-based organizations could utilize the weekly installments and actions as curriculum. Publicity, viral messaging, eblasts, and word of mouth will drive people to the site to view the weekly installments, which then lead viewers to specific actions and local campaigns in their communities, organized by the six partner organizations. Groups and Individuals will have the opportunity to videotape and post their responses.

Since the inception of the project in December 2005, producer and director Luisa Dantas has been working in strategic partnership with social justice groups on a local and national level including ACORN, Amnesty International, AFL/CIO, Color of Change, U.S. Human Rights Network, Moveon.Org, NOVAC, PATOIS, The Workers Center for Racial Justice, Oxfam, PolicyLink, Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, The Advancement Project, NESRI, GNOFHAC, NLIHC, National Center on Homelessness and Poverty, STAND, Survivors Village, SEIU, WITNESS, the Center for Constitutional Rights, MAYDAY New Orleans, GOLES and many others. Though our summer engagement series will be organized by six main organizations, the outreach and audience engagement strategy will be supported by a broad coalition of these groups.

ADDITIONAL CONTENT and EDUCATIONALOUTREACH:

In addition to the six 20-minute segments, we are brainstorming about how best to leverage our creative capital and organize the delivery of additional storylines that viewers could choose to follow each week. There is great potential with our material for viewers to have the option to watch more material about a specific character or to view additional material related to a topical story strand.

Locally, in partnership with NOVAC (New Orleans Video Access Center), we are helping to design two youth digital media workshops, Animation and Editing, for Summer 2010. In the Animation workshop, the class will create a one-minute animation based on a video clip of Tr’vel Lyons, the high school student who was displaced from New Orleans to Los Angeles, which will be embeddable and used to promote the project virally. In the Editing workshop, youth will work with footage produced by the LAND OF OPPORTUNITY project to create short viral videos that will be launched on our website mid-way through our summer engagement series. We also aim to create a comprehensive curriculum that maximizes the film’s potential as an educational tool to be utilized in classrooms across the country. We are currently developing partnerships with colleges and universities in several states with departments ranging from urban planning to anthropology.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
Arte	$ 129,087.00	10/01/2009
Ford Foundation	$ 10,000.00	08/01/2009
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation	$ 1,500.00	03/01/2009
Chicken and Egg Pictures/Tides Foundation	$ 15,000.00	02/01/2009
Rockefeller Foundation	$ 50,000.00	04/01/2008
RHI Films	$ 6,000.00	01/01/2008
Dakota Group	$ 10,000.00	11/01/2007
Chicken and Egg Pictures/Tides Foundation	$ 10,000.00	10/01/2007
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation	$ 2,000.00	07/01/2007
Individual Donors	$ 10,000.00	05/01/2007
Producers Cash	$ 94,000.00	07/01/2006

Location(s)

532 Louisa Street
New Orleans, LA, 70117
See Google Maps

Short Synopsis

Six people, one city, our future. From front-porches to frontlines, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY captures the tumultuous reconstruction of a quintessential American city, New Orleans.

Description/Treatment

Six people, one city, our future. As the 5thAnniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches on August 29th, 2010,communities all over the world are struggling to recover from disaster, whethereconomic, natural or man-made. LAND OF OPPORTUNITY, feature-length film andmulti-platform documentary project, interweaves the stories of a diversegroup of people as they struggle to rebuild post-catastrophe New Orleans. From the urban planner to the immigrant worker to the public housing resident,our protagonists hail from different walks of life but share a stake in therebirth of this beloved city. Through their eyes, we experience the dramaticups and downs of a massive and unprecedented urban reconstruction process.Unfortunately, disasters like the recent tragedy in Haiti have shown that ourworld has become no less precarious in the four and half years since Katrinahit New Orleans.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “we live in a worldof Katrinas”, and the hurricane was a wake-up call for people around the globewho live in increasingly vulnerable cities and towns. The reconstructionof New Orleans has provided ample opportunities for those seeking profit andpower, yet it has also provided unprecedented chances for ordinary citizens toget engaged and fight for the future of their communities. As conflicts eruptbetween the haves and the have-nots, viewers will experience New Orleans as amicrocosm of an urban America increasingly divided by race and class. Byintertwining the stories of our diverse protagonists, the main goal of LAND OFOPPORTUNITY is to shed light on some of the major issues of our time, includingaffordable housing, immigration, economic displacement, and disasterpreparedness and recovery. Through our characters’ poignant experiences, viewersengage with these complex and issues in an emotional and highly personalway. For many, New Orleans has become synonymous with Katrina, but LANDOF OPPORTUNITY tells the definitive, in-depth story of what happened after thefloodwaters receded and why it matters to the world at large.

This multi-platform project will utilize web-basedinteractive content and innovative distribution methods to engage viewers in awide range of constituencies, from urban youth to urban planning experts.Produced in conjunction with a broad coalition of local, national andinternational non-profits and social justice groups, the LAND OF OPPORTUNITYproject will utilize open programming so that communities all over the worldcan respond to the issues raised by the film and offer feedback from their ownlocales. ARTE France will broadcast the film for the 5th Anniversary ofHurricane Katrina, a milestone when the world will once again turn their eyestowards New Orleans.

LAND OFOPPORTUNITY creates a layered narrative comprised of interwoven story strands.We follow each of our main characters as they experience key moments in thereconstruction of New Orleans. Although the path of each major character isunique, all are united throughout the film by the common themes of opportunity,loss, and the search for home.

Our guidesthrough “Land of Opportunity”:

ANDRESDUANY, URBAN PLANNER

Aworld-renowned urban planner and architect, Cuban-born Andres Duany is amongthe dozens of experts hired to help create the official rebuilding plans forNew Orleans. A controversial and charismatic founder of the “New Urbanism”movement, which advocates for the creation of European-style “walkable”communities, Duany sees himself as a visionary capable of transforming thisbeleaguered city into a model for the 21st century. His biggest goal is torestore the original zoning and building codes that the French used to buildthe city’s famous French Quarter. Ultimately, he is frustrated by internalconflicts within the planning process and political inertia, but inadvertentlytransforms the life of one resident he encounters.

ALAUBRY, URBAN GARDENER

Al Aubry,is a homeowner from the devastated Gentilly neighborhood who traces his Creoleancestry in New Orleans back three hundred years. Al is determined to view hispost-catastrophe situation as an opportunity for increased self-sufficiency.Living in a cramped FEMA trailer with his wife and two children for over twoyears, Al wants nothing more than to rebuild a bigger and better home in the samespot, but government bureaucracy stands in his way. An encounter with Duany athis planning studio changes Al’s life. With the planner’s urging, he plants agarden in his backyard and within months is feeding his family with homegrownvegetables. Despite the setbacks and obstacles he encounters, Al neverloses his sense of optimism. As he says, “Little seedlings…that’s hope!”

VANESSAGUERINGER—COMMUNITY ACTIVIST

On theother side of town from Al Aubry, in the now infamous Lower 9th WardNeighborhood, a different kind of struggle for survival is going on. VanessaGueringer, a community activist, is fighting to resuscitate this ravagedAfrican-American neighborhood. Before Katrina, she was a wife and mother mainlydevoted to her family, but, as she put it, the devastation of the hurricane andthe failed government response “lit a fire” within her, motivating her tobecome a crusader for the rebirth of her beloved community. While struggling torebuild her own home, Vanessa becomes a powerful activist with thecontroversial community group ACORN and a vocal thorn in the side of the localpoliticians. Along the way, she crosses paths with larger-than-life celebritiesBrad Pitt, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. When Hurricane Gustav threatensthe city three years after Katrina, Vanessa helps to ensure that herneighborhood is prepared.

MARCIO PASSOS, IMMIGRANT WORKER

While residents like Vanessa strive to reclaim their belovedcommunities, others, like immigrant worker Marcio Passos search for greaterprosperity. Hoisting heavy construction debris as he helps to renovate theHilton Hotel, Marcio dreams of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, where hewants to settle with his wife and two sons whom he reluctantly left behind inBrazil. A former car salesman, Marcio never dreamed he’d be doing manual laborin America. Marcio also feels proud to participate in the reconstructionof New Orleans, a city he grows to love. However, after over two years ofincreasingly intermittent work, it becomes clear the construction boom has nottruly materialized, and his wife is pressuring him to return home. Eventually Marcio acquiesces in order to save his marriage. At the end ofthe film, we find him back at home in his old job, despondent over an impendingdivorce. He vows to return to New Orleans one day.

TR’VELLYONS, DISPLACED RESIDENT

LikeMarcio and other immigrants in his situation, displaced New Orleanians likeTr’vel Lyons struggle to find community and solid footing in new and unfamiliarplaces. Now a high school student in Lost Angeles, Tr’vel is committed totaking advantage of what he sees as greater educational and economicopportunities away from New Orleans. However, when he pays a visit to hishometown for the first time since Katrina, he becomes keenly aware of the pricehe’s paid by being away from beloved friends and family.

SHARONAND KAWANA JASPER, PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS

WhileTr’vel voluntarily remains in exile, low-income public housing residents likemother and daughter Sharon and Kawana Jasper have not been given a choice.After Katrina, the federal government decided to demolish almost all of thepublic housing New Orleans, which provided affordable housing to many of thecity’s poor black residents. Sharon and Kawana decide to fight this decisionand to save their former homes and communities. Through their eyes, the viciousstruggle for affordable housing comes alive as residents and activists engagein sometimes-violent skirmishes with a federal government determined to usecatastrophes like Katrina as an opportunity to privatize public services. Like most of the subjects portrayed in LAND OF OPPORTUNITY, Sharon and Kawana’sstory puts a personal face on larger issues.

As thesecompelling people navigate the rocky terrain of the rebuilding process, we walka mile in their shoes, engaging with timely issues that are universal in scope:urban redevelopment, immigration, racism, poverty and economic displacement.The goal of this project is to show how New Orleans is a bellwether for thefuture of cities all over our increasingly interdependent and fragile world.LAND OF OPPORTUNITY asks viewers to ponder what the rebuilding of New Orleanscan teach them about their own communities.

After almost three years offull-time production, LAND OF OPORTUNITY began post-production in May of2008. We have made great strides with limited resources. We arecurrently editing the rough cut and seeking completion funding and domesticdistribution. Last year, we attended the Working Films Residency at Mass MoCA,participated in the IFP Documentary Rough Cut Lab, and, with funding from theFord Foundation, produced short videos for community screenings on the 4thAnniversary of Katrina. We received a pre-buy offer from Arte in Europe,which plans to broadcast the film on the 5th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrinain 2010. The film is the perfect fit for a broadcast on the 5th Anniversary, atime to reflect not only on the hurricane and subsequent levee failure, butalso to discover how New Orleans is emblematic of our urban future.

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