This American Gothic weaves together a cultural history of America’s most famous painting with a quirky portrait of Eldon, Iowa, population 998, and home to the house that inspired it. The film follows four local women over two years as they work towards their dream of building a Gothic House Visitor Center to revive their fading small town. This American Gothic explores the poignant irony of a rural America abandoned to economic hardship trying to rebuild itself through tourism that glorifies a happier, if largely imaginary, country past.

This American Gothic features interviews with Stanford art historian Wanda Corn, author of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision; Harvard historian Steven Biel, author of American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting, and political theorist and The Huffington Post blogger, John Seery.

Garbage strikes, gas shortages, graffiti-covered subways - a city near economic collapse. Welcome to New York, 1979. Amidst the littered streets just south of Harlem sits P.S. 75 – an integrated public elementary school flooded with artists and writers teaching filmmaking and radio, poetry and performance. Renowned New York writer Phillip Lopate was then a part-time poet at the school. Chekhov for Children is a feature documentary film that tells the story of his ambitious staging on Broadway of Uncle Vanya – Chekhov's heartbreaking play about thwarted, middle aged longing and wasted youth – by 10-year-olds, including the filmmaker. Chekhov for Children captures in student-made super 8mm films and videos a time and place when idealistic young teachers didn't 'teach to the test,' and revists their now middle aged students who grew up believing anything was possible.

Razing Appalachia explores the potential for environmental and economic justice in the coalfields and communities of southern West Virginia by chronicling a grassroots fight against the expansion of the nation's fourth-largest mountaintop mine. The video had its broadcast premiere on the national PBS series Independent Lens in 2003, and in 2005 was selected for the first season of the groundbreaking new series from ITVS, True Stories: Life in the U.S.A., to be broadcast internationally on public TV in Peru, Malawi & Egypt.

>more about Razing Appalachia – the people, the community, the history & the video.

read Nancy Franklin's review
in The New Yorker