Docs In Progress accepts monetary donations on behalf of fiscally sponsored documentary projects.
Donation by Check
If you wish to make a donation to any of the projects below by check, please make the check out to “Docs In Progress” and note the title of the project in the memo line. Checks may be mailed to:
Docs In Progress
8700 First Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Donation by Credit Card
If you wish to make a donation by credit card, please click the link under each project.
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Coded Generations
Filmmakers: Camelia Fawzy, Olha Onyshko and Sarah Farhat
Film’s Website: http://www.codedgenerations.com
By the year 2030, more than 6 1/2 million students (or 7% of all students) will graduate from secondary schools after having followed what is known as an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) aimed predominantly at students with behavioral, learning, or intellectual disabilities. Coded Generations follows the day-to-day life of individuals with disabilities starting from kindergarten all the way to the workplace and investigates what could be done to allow them to live their lives in inclusive environments.The film aims to raise society’s awareness about the growing possibilities and the long-term benefits that could be offered by an inclusive workforce that embraces individuals with disabilities and gives them opportunities to productively contribute to society.
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Deej
Filmmakers: Robert Rooy and DJ Savarese
Film’s Website: http://www.deejthemovie.com
Deej is the still-unfolding story of DJ Savarese (a.k.a. “Deej”), a gifted, nonspeaking teenager in Grinnell Iowa, as he fights to become independent in the face of classic autism, acute anxiety and a traumatic past. It is a story told “from the inside out” – from DJ’s perspective, using his powerful, poetic words, composed one finger at a time on a keyboard. Deej is groundbreaking in that it is the first major documentary in which an autist is a full partner in the filmmaking process.
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Forgotten Soldiers
Filmmaker: Donald Plata
Film’s Website: http://www.ww2scouts.com
They were a group of elite U.S. Army Soldiers who fought America’s first major ground battle of the Second World War. They were General MacArthur’s best soldiers at the start of the conflict. They were widely responsible for the prolonged seige of Bataan, an action that drained so much time and resources from Imperial Japan that it prevented the Japanese invasion of Australia. They were the United States Army’s Philippine Scouts. Though half of these forgotten soldiers were killed in action or captivity, a few lived to tell their story.
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From Slave to Ukrainian Idol
Filmmakers: Shelia Slemp and Olha Onyshyko
Shoni, a young Roma boy dreams of being the next pop music sensation. Sold into slavery by his mother at age six and sent to an orphanage in Ukraine ten years later, Shoni faces enormous obstacles as he overcomes psychological and behavioral issues to adapting to life as a young, free man. Now he is determined to pursue a singing career by auditioning for Ukrainian Idol.
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hijabi girls
Filmmakers: Alexandra Viets and Sabine Keinath
Film’s Website: http://hijabigirls.info/
The film, hijabi girls examines the lives of three Muslim-American teenage girls in America today who wear the hijab (head scarf). At a time when political Islam continues to dominate public discourse, the girls explain their reasoning behind the decision to wear the hijab and the reaction of their peers. Despite their scarves, the girls look, sound and think very much like other American high school students. They explain frankly and often with strong emotion, their reasons for choosing as, one girl puts it, “to cover.” The girls’ descriptions of how they are treated by their peers reveal a world where they are often viewed with suspicion, pity and even as advocates of terror. Despite public perception, the girls are powerfully recognizable as American teenagers. They are funny, bright, self-aware, and articulate. At the film’s core is the journey of the girls as they seek to guard their individual differences while trying to construct lives that resemble that of a typical American teenager.
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The Last Colony
Filmmaker: Rebecca Kingsley
Website: http://www.thelastcolony.org
We have learned much about the United States’ transformation from a country where segments of the population were denied the right to vote and participate in their government to one of inclusion because of the courageous actions of ordinary citizens. Civil rights activism has always been a potent force in American political life. And yet today there are still more than a half million American citizens who are disenfranchised because they have no representation in the United States Congress. Adding to the irony is the fact that this denial of democratic rights is being practiced in the very city in which this government resides — Washington, D.C.
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The Lost Dream (formerly titled Friends of America)
Filmmaker: Jehan Harney
Film’s Website: http://www.jehanharney.com/In%20Production.html|
The war in Iraq has displaced more than two million refugees, including nearly 30,000 who ended up in the United States. Many cannot go back home where militias are targeting them as collaborators with the U.S. Yet they face challenges moving forward with new lives in America, torn by family separation, post-traumatic stress, dire economic realities, and unfulfilled promises. In an intimate verite style, Dream of America follows some the stories of two refugee families, silent victims of the war. This film has already received seed funding from ITVS.
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The New Woman: Annie ‘Londonderry’ Kopchovsky
Filmmaker: Gillian Willman
Film’s Website: http://www.spokeswomanproductions.com
In 1894, there were no female sports stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. But Annie Kopchovksy—a 23-year old Jewish immigrant from Boston—changed all of that. “The New Woman: Annie ‘Londonderry’ Kopchovksy” is a documentary about an improbable journey by bicycle and the fiery woman who dared to undertake it. What emerges in this film is a complex portrait of a woman manipulating the forces of a rapidly changing world. At a time when the definitions of American, Jew, immigrant, and woman were anything but static, Annie was able to ride the waves of her own imagination to freedom and fame.
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Nuke Bonds Trilogy
Filmmaker: Beth Humpert
Film’s Website: http://nukebonds.com/
Nuke B
onds Trilogy is a series of films which each explore aspects of a complicated relationship — U.S.-Russian nuclear non-proliferation since the end of the Cold War. From an eccentric bee-keeping nuclear scientist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to the next generation of students from Russia’s nuclear cities, Nuke Bonds uses personal stories to offer hope for arms control in the future.
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The Peace Agency
Filmmaker: Sue Useem
Film’s Website: http://www.spottedfrogproductions.com
An extraordinary grassroots school is being held on a woman’s front porch in the post-conflict zone of Poso, Indonesia. Lian Gogali is teaching female survivors of nearly a decade of communal violence how to transform themselves into agents of peace for their families and communities. The Peace Agency is an emotionally powerful and thought-provoking film, documenting the difficulties women face – and the triumphs they can achieve – in Indonesia. It captures the blunt realities of living on the margins of a country still struggling to embrace the concept of women’s rights and inter-communal harmony.
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Refrigerator Ladies: The Remarkable Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers
Filmmaker:Kathy Kleiman
Film’s Website: http://www.eniacprogrammers.org
During the Second World War, many young women were hired by the Army for their mathematical acumen, taking on a job called “Computers.” In the last days of the war, six “Computers” mastered the power of an 80 foot long, 8 foot tall, black metal machine and harnessed its power through an archaic programming interface using dozens of wires and 3000 switches. They programmed ENIAC, the first all-electronic programmable computer to perform a ballistics trajectory, a differential calculus equation important to the war effort, and they succeeded brilliantly. When the ENIAC was unveiled to the public on February 15, 1946, their program captured the imagination of the press and made headlines across the country. Afterwards, the ENIAC became a legendary machine which would pave the way for the computer age. Its engineers (all men) became famous. Never introduced or credited at the ENIAC events of the 1940s, the women programmers’ story disappeared from history. They became invisible. Until now.
Three Stories of Galicia (formerly titled Land of Dilemmas)
Filmmakers: Olha Onyshko and Sarah Farhat
Film’s Website: http://www.threestoriesofgalicia.com
This film takes viewers to an unexpected journey into the Second World War and to a place that until recently was hidden from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain. The events of this film take place around the current Polish-Ukrainian border where before the War, three major groups used to live: Ukrainians, Jews and Poles. When the War started, that region became the battlefield of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In addition to their own persecutions, Nazis and Soviets fueled major ethnic conflicts between these groups to advance their own interests. Yet, in the midst of total hate, there were people who refused to be brainwashed by propaganda and decided to help the “other” even if it involved putting their own lives in danger. Now more than 60 years later, this film tells the incredible stories of a Ukrainian, a Jewish and a Polish survivor who were all saved by their enemies.
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