California Council for the Humanities

Programs

Featured Project

“Prison Town, USA”

What happens when a struggling rural town tries to revive its economy by inviting a prison in? "Prison Town," USA gives an inside view of the lives of rookie guards, disgruntled locals, transplanted families of prisoners and others trapped in a modern day penal colony — illuminating the legacy of the greatest prison building boom in human history. The film will air nationally on P.O.V. in 2007.

Find out more.

Production Awards

• Forget Me Not
  Open Eye Pictures, Inc.
  Producer and Director: Andy Abrahams Wilson
  The story of the Aids Memorial in Golden Gate Park
• Inside/Out: Life in a California Prison
  Backbone Media
  Writer, Producer and Director: Noel Schwerin
  Life in a California State Prison
• Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times
  International Documentary Association
  Producer and Director: Peter Jones
  The emergence of modern-day Los Angeles during the Chandler era at the Los Angeles Times
• Metropolis in the Making
  International Documentary Association
  Producer and Director: Clement Barclay
  Urban redevelopment in Los Angeles: Who decides what goes and what stays?
• Moments in Time
  Rural California Broadcasting Corporation (KRCB)
  Producer and Director: Nancy Kelly
  How citizen action saved the Marin County coast

• Calexico: California Borderlands
  W.M. Corporation
  Project Director: Peter Laufer
  The true story of life in California’s borderlands

Research And Development Film Awards

• Birth of a Movement: Behind the Velvet Curtain (The Hidden History of the U.S. Supreme Court and Gay Rights)
  Film Arts Foundation
  Project Director: Beth Pielert
  The Supreme Court and Gay Rights
• Filipinos: Forgotten Heroes of the UFW
  Iris Films
  Project Director and Producer: Marissa Aroy
  The forgotten role of Filipinos in the early farmworker movement
• Homegirls
  Urban Berney Foundation
  Producer and Director: Isabel Vega
  Once involved in gang life, young women get a chance at a new life
• Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man
  Film Arts Foundation
  Director: Christopher Million
  The life and work of Jack London
• Lost Treasure Hunt
  Film Arts Foundation
  Producer and Project Director: Matthew G. Davis
  Enlivening California history for young people
• ¿Mas Bebés?
  Visual Communications
  Producer and Director: Renee Tajima-Peña
  The forced sterilization of Mexican American women and the fight for justice
• Preaching Revolution
  Center for Independent Documentary
  Coproducers and Codirectors: Katie Galoway and Po Kutchins
  The emerging progressive evangelical movement

FILM/VIDEO

• California and the American Dream
  Bay Area Video Coalition
  Exploring the dynamics of culture, identity and civic engagement in California
• Chicano Rock!
  Rock 'n’ Roll and Latino Identity in California
  Historical Society of Southern California
  Chicano rock ‘n’ roll and it’s role in defining the Latino Community
• Going on 13
  Film Arts Foundation
  Four girls from immigrant and working-class families navigate adolescence
• Grassroots Rising
  Asian-American Workers in Los Angeles
  Visual Communications
  Low-wage Asian immigrant workers struggle to improve their lives through community-based organizing
• Hollywood Chinese
  Film Arts Foundation
  San Francisco
  A film history of Chinese Americans in Hollywood
• Juvies
  Community Transitions
  Young offenders in one of the largest juvenile facilities in the United States await trial and sentencing in adult court
• Los Angeles Now
  Center for the Study of Los Angeles
  L.A.'s changing character and culture is explored
• Manju Mamas and the Ahn-Pan Brigade
  Visual Communications
  How three Nisei Christian women in the San Fernando Valley stay connected to their Japanese heritage
• Most are Losers: The Life and Death of a Racetrack
  Film Arts Foundation
  Director-Producer Sara MacPherson and Producer Mark Arellano
  The world of the racetrack worker at Bay Meadows racetrack
• Paperback Dreams
  Catticus Corporation
  Producer-Director Alex Beckstead
  The rise and fall of independent bookstores
• Preacher’s Sons
  International Documentary Association
  Coproducers-Codirectors Celia Reed and Mark Nealey
  Chronicling the life of a gay couple and their five adopted sons
• Prison Town, USA
  Center for Independent Documentary
  The effect of the prison boom on a rural California town
• Romántico
  Film Arts Foundation
  San Francisco
  An undocumented Mexican musician supports himself and his family in Mexico by playing "romantica" music in San Francisco restaurants
• Seasons of Migration
  Khmer Arts Academy
  Interpreting the changing identities of Cambodian refugees in Long Beach through Cambodian classical dance
• The Tailenders
  Film Arts Foundation
  A missionary organization uses low-tech media devices to evangelize Mexican agricultural workers
• Thinking Grande: Creating California's Mexican Wonderland
  Media Arts Center San Diego
  One man spends decades building a Mexican village in Santa Barbara County
• Valentino’s Ghost
  International Documentary Association
  How Hollywood portrays Arabs and Muslims
• When Medicine Got It Wrong
  International Documentary Association
  Producer-Director Katie Cadigan
  How San Mateo County parents changed how schizophrenia is perceived

RADIO

• The Boomtown Chronicles:
  Reflections on a Changing California
  KUSP-FM - Santa Cruz
  How four California families on California's Central Coast are redefining the concept of home and community in an era of widespread change
• Growing Old in East L.A.
  Atlantic Public Media
  Elderly Chicanos in East Los Angeles tell their stories in a radio documentary
• Pastures of Plenty:
  The History of California Farmworkers
  Pataphysical Broadcasting Foundation, Inc.
  A multipart radio series on the history of California’s agricultural workers
• Saving the Sierra:
  Voices of Conservation in Action
  The Sierra Fund
  How community-based conservationists are working together for a better Sierra

PHOTOGRAPHY

• From Where I Am Standing:
  Photographs and Writings Documenting the Experiences of Latino Youth in Los Angeles, 1995-2005
  College of Arts and Letters,
  California State University, Los Angeles
  A group of Latino young adults, all participants in a photography and writing project as junior-high and high- school students, document their lives through words and photographs
• Herstory
  Migrant Photography Project
  Lindsay
  A photography project documenting in images and words the lives and work of Mexican migrant women in Central California
• Iranian Jewish California
  Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity
  A look at Persian Jewish immigrants in California
• Life Cycles:
  Reflections of Change and a New Hope for Future Generations
  Regents of the University of California
  Documenting the lives of migrant workers in the Coachella Valley
• Living Under the Trees
  California Legal Assistance, Inc.
  Documenting Oaxacan farmworker communities in California
• The New Okies
  Santa Barbara County Arts Commission
  Photographs of farmworkers in Santa Barbara County past and present
• Paving Paradise: Stories From the Santa Ana Watershed
  Foundation for California State University
  San Bernardino and the Water Resource Institute
  Photographs document the watershed and its role within surrounding communities
• The Hmong of Central California: A Culture in Transition
  Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Ministries
  Documenting in photographs the Hmong refugee community