People died and many more became extremely ill in the city’s 5-year-old water crisis that was still making headlines last week as the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance-produced documentary “Flint: The Poisoning of an American City” had its world premiere and opened in a chain of Michigan movie theaters.
To Breathe Free, a short movie produced by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), will be screened twice in upcoming days at the DC Shorts Film Festival in Washington, D.C. Produced and shot in D.C., the film follows the five-year saga of a Syrian family fleeing the war in Homs, Syria to refugee camps in Jordan to beginning their new life in the nation’s capital.
During the heyday of PBS’s “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” even a lot of Presbyterians did not know that the mild-spoken host of the popular PBS children’s program was a clergyman, indeed, no doubt the most famous living Presbyterian in all the world.
As they gathered in one of America's major cities with a reputation for violence, some of those attending the 221st General Assembly (2014) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) watched a denominationally produced documentary on gun violence, and then tackled how to address the issue.
“It’s insane really," said Saul Green of Ceasefire Detroit, which works together with law enforcement and community service groups to impress upon young people the price they will pay for criminal activity. "Why are young people killing each other over mundane things like shoes, or cell phones?”
Gun violence is not just a tragedy, it is a disaster with waves that spread in many directions, viewers of the new documentary film Trigger: The Ripple Effect of Gun Violence affirm.
“Those ripples affect every single one of us,” said David Roberts, a member of Lake View Presbyterian Church in Chicago. Hearing the stories and seeing the pictures in this film will “heighten the awareness … of how gun violence affects people everywhere,” he said.
As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, PBS premieres “The Abolitionists,” a three-part series, Jan. 8.
Canadian documentarian Rob Rapley, the writer and director of the series, talked with Religion News Service about the role religion played in the lives of the abolitionists.
In the wake of the Dec. 14 school shootings in Newtown, Conn., requests for screenings of “Trigger: The Ripple Effect of Gun Violence” have increased dramatically, according to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) and the National Council of Churches (NCC). The documentary film was produced by PDA’s David Barnhart for the NCC, which distributes television programming through the Interfaith Broadcasting Commission, a media coalition that includes the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It was released to NBC Television stations in mid-November for airing by network affiliate stations.
A Presbyterian-supported documentary about faith-based responses to domestic violence has been nominated for two Emmy awards.
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) will televise a six-hour documentary series on the history of religious life in America. The series — “God in America” — produced by WGBH in Boston, will air in November 2010.
“In America, religion matters and in American history, religion has always mattered,” says promotional material for the year-from-now series. “The American story cannot be fully understood without understanding how religious ideas and spiritual experience shaped that history.”
The shows will cover 500 years of American religious history, from the arrival of Columbus to the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president. It …