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.

Vanya '79 is about a performance of the play Uncle Vanya at the Symphony Space theater in New York City by a group of public school 5th and 6th graders in 1979. Directed by the writer Philip Lopate and immortalized in his essay "Chekhov for Children," the production was a mad folly and remarkable success, captured in its entirely on black-and-white video.

Vanya '79 revisits these now middle-aged children and meditates upon noble self-delusion; misspent youth, unrequited love – the great themes Chekhov explores throughout his work. The film is also about the very nature of character as it is expressed in childhood versus adulthood, the very nature of childhood itself, and life at middle-age. It’s about the free-wheeling New York of the late 1970s, and about a time when public school arts education really mattered and, quite possibly, made a difference.

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