Living Black

A documentary about the power of family.

Raised in America, a Lebanese-born filmmaker reaches out to his aging grandmother in Lebanon to document the stories of his family and country of origin.

Long ago, in a time that is all but forgotten, the heart of America was French.

For the first time in history movie theaters are being forced to switch from film projection over to digital with the goal of the customers not noticing a difference. Most people are surprised to learn that film projection in its basic form has remained unchanged for over one hundred years. So if it hasn't been digital for several years now, how have theaters projected big, bright clear images for so long?

HouseProyecto follows a home construction project over a summer. There is no narration or talking heads, simply a documentation of labor carried out both by the family and construction workers. The construction team builds an addition on the front of the house, while the family carries on its routines at the back of the house. The piece explores rituals of work and the unnatural relationship between strangers and the family sharing the same space. Inevitably, the video also touches on class and cultural divides.

Rewriting the U.S. Declaration of Independence as A Declaration of Interdependence, award-winning Director and Founder of the Webby Awards Tiffany Shlain and her team posted a script online and invited the world to participate in a crowdsourced film. Video, art, and translation submissions poured in from around the world, in over 50 languages from English to Swahili to ASL (American Sign Language). A Declaration of Interdependence quickly became an exhilarating montage of user-generated content, a global mash-up demonstrating the vast potential of creative collaboration in the 21st century.