S1.E2 ∙ Cape buffalo: the widow maker

Documentary exploring the wide range of nonprofit organizations that operate in Santa Barbara County, California.

Two dedicated occupational therapists, one in the United States and one in Japan, address the needs of developmentally challenged children by connecting them with the natural world. Their innovative approaches to individual and group therapy show results thought not to be possible. At a week-long summer camp in Lyons, Colorado, autistic teenagers from Japan are immersed in nature and in contact with domesticated animals. Communication skills that are refined and deepened with farm animals and pets have a lasting effect on improved interactions with human beings. At a reunion held in Nagasaki five months later, the children and their parents talk about what this experience has meant to their lives.

Can the family survive? A space in jeopardy. A family in jeopardy.

Intimately and exuberantly, AUGUST TO JUNE is a voice for values we are on the brink of losing in the single-minded pursuit of higher test scores for our students! In the era of No Child Left Behind rigidity, we spend a year in a public school classroom happily going against the current. The film follows 26 8-10 year-olds as they write poems, raise chickens, resolve differences, and find their own voices. With humor and poignancy AUGUST TO JUNE reveals some of the complexity involved in a meaningful education, and gently asks audiences to stop and consider how we achieve the goal of curious and creative adults able to support a democratic society.

This video documents the imaginative exploration of fifteen six-year-olds on a journey in Highland Park, East New York, Brooklyn. Each group, dressed in its own shade of orange clothing, discovers a mysterious seed sculpture/house hidden in the woods. The children spontaneously explore this object and play amongst themselves, creating meaning for the box and their relationship to it. The children's voices provide a meditative narration that runs throughout the video, allowing viewers to get inside the children's minds as they go together on a poetic adventure.

Michael Rosen takes us on a journey behind the scenes of bringing the classic story to the big screen, including a performance of the original book, visiting the original illustrator Helen Oxenbury and talking to George Ezra at Abbey Road Studios.