Nancy Kelly
1) Downside Up
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
How does a dying working class town end up betting its future on art? With 80% of its downtown buildings closed, North Adams, Massachusetts united blue-collar locals with art world luminaries to transform economic failure into America's largest center for contemporary art, MASS MoCA. A film by North Adams native Nancy Kelly, DOWNSIDE UP is about the tentative, dangerous notion of hope in a city widely viewed as hopeless. When, in the 1980s, the Sprague...
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
TRUST begins in a small theater as a group of teenage actors receive a standing ovation, then takes us back to the beginning, when Marlín, an 18-year-old Hondureña tells a traumatic story about her life to the company. Amazing things unfold as the young members of Chicago's Albany Park Theater Project (APTP) transform the story into a daring, original play. TRUST is about creativity and the unexpected resources inside people you might discount because...
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
A stunningly beautiful film narrated by Frances McDormand, Rebels With a Cause spotlights a battle over land that changed the American landscape forever. Beginning in the 1950s, a national movement was born of principles that may seem obvious today. Unconvinced by land developers who promoted residential construction as unmitigated progress, citizens began banding together to preserve open spaces near urban areas for parks and farms — and took the...
Pub. Date
1990.
Description
Set in a mining town in the 1880s, THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD is based on the classic novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn with a screenplay by award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace (Tribal Justice). Upon its release in 1990, the film won immediate acclaim for its portrayal of the real-life story of Lalu (Rosalind Chao), a young Chinese woman whose desperately poor parents sell her into slavery. She is trafficked to a nefarious saloonkeeper in Idaho's gold...