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Arts Engine is a film organization whose activities include documentary film production, film festival, and a website for filmmakers, activists, educators and students to share information.
Arts Engine was founded by Katy Chevigny and Julia Pimsleur in 1997 to focus on social issue documentaries. Their projects include 11 feature-length documentaries. The best-known of these is the Emmy-nominated film Deadline. Arts Engine launched a website called MediaRights.org, a database of social issue documentaries with over 7,400 films registered. They subsequently made the Youth Media Dissemination Initiative (YMDi.org). They also developed the Media That Matters Film Festival, an early online film festival. The site is no longer active and when you click the link below to visit the website, it opens a page of the internet archive to show the status of the page in 2007, the time when the website was the most active.
 | This section is written like a review .(June 2011) |
Big Mouth Films is a production company that works on feature-length, social issue documentaries.
(A)sexual (2011)
(A)sexual follows the growth of a community that experiences no sexual attraction. It uses interviews, variety of footage, and animation to document David Jay and four other characters. (A)sexual premiered at the Frameline Film Festival on June 18, 2011.
Pushing the Elephant (2010)
Pushing the Elephant follows Rose Mapendo, her work as an activist, and her relationship with her daughter Nangabire, who had remained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when Rose fled in the late 1990s. It was directed by Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel. It was screened on PBS's series Independent Lens in early 2011.
Election Day (2007)
Election Day follows American voters nationwide on November 2, 2004 to document the democratic process. Election Day premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) in 2007.
Arctic Son (2006)
In the Arctic village of Old Crow, a father and son who come from different backgrounds are reunited after 20 years apart. Arctic Son was released on POV on August 21, 2007.
Deadline (2004)
Deadline follows Illinois Governor George Ryan as he questions the guilt of thirteen people slated for execution. Deadline won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award and was nominated for an Emmy.
Journey to the West (2001)
Journey to the West looks at the origins of traditional Chinese medicine, how it is used in modern-day China, and how it has been adapted in the United States. The film includes footage of traditional medical practices in the People's Republic of China and interviews of Chinese medical practitioners in the United States.
Outside Looking In (2001)
This film documents three families with trans-racially adopted children of different races, across generations. It includes the transition from natural parents to adoptive parents, and challenges of racial identity for children of one race who are raised in another.
Brother Born Again (2000)
Julia Pimsleur, a bisexual, Jewish New Yorker, travels to Alaska to reconnect with her brother, a born again Christian. He has lived with his family there for ten years since dropping out of college and converting.
Nuyorican Dream (2000)
Nuyorican Dream is the story of a New York Puerto Rican family contending with urban poverty. Clips from the movie were used in a radio story for This American Life covering the same topic.
Innocent Until Proven Guilty (1999)
James Forman, Jr. is a public defender and the son of civil rights activist James Forman. The film follows Forman's work at the Public Defender Service and at an alternative high school for juvenile ex-offenders.
The Media That Matters Film Festival is an interactive, yearlong series of short films on social issues such as immigration, global warming, fair trade, gay rights, and sustainable agriculture.
Past awards ceremonies have included presentations by Ira Glass, Byron Hurt, Tim Robbins, Al Franken, Chuck D, Woody Harrelson, Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple, David Cross, Reiko Aylesworth, and comedian Sam Seder. Past festivals have also included a live tour, distribution through Netflix, and independent screenings.
MediaRights.org is a website focused on issue-oriented media. At one point it had 26,000 registered members and hosted more than 7,400 films in its online database.
Kirby Bryan Dick is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing Twist of Faith (2005) and The Invisible War (2012). He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival.
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo is a 2007 documentary film directed by Lisa F. Jackson concerned with survivors of rape in the regions affected by ongoing conflicts stemming from the Second Congo War. Central to the film are moving interviews with the survivors themselves, as well as interviews with self-confessed rapist soldiers. The Greatest Silence was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize and won a Special Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It was also nominated for two News & Documentary Emmy Awards in 2009. It aired on HBO in January & February 2009.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Nancy Schwartzman is an American documentary filmmaker, human rights activist, member of the Directors Guild of America, and The Academy.
Mike Manning is an American actor, producer, reality television personality and activist. Manning gained fame as a cast member on the MTV series The Real World: D.C. in 2009 at 22 years old. Before subsequently embarking on an acting career, he appeared in a number of films and television programs, such as the 2014 Disney Channel original movie Cloud 9, in which he played Nick Swift, Hawaii Five-0, Love Is All You Need? (2016), Teen Wolf, The Call, Son of the South and Days of Our Lives. As a producer, his work includes the documentary Kidnapped for Christ, and The Bay, which won the 2020 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Digital Daytime Drama Series. He won the 2021 Daytime Emmy Award Outstanding Performance By a Supporting Actor in a Daytime Fiction Program for his performance as Caleb McKinnon.
Stalin K. is an Indian documentary filmmaker, media and human rights activist. His films, Lesser Humans and India Untouched, on the issue of caste and untouchability in contemporary India, have galvanized international attention to caste discrimination and won numerous film awards. He has done pioneering work on new models of community media to empower marginalized groups. His interview and clips from his film were featured in Episode 10: Dignity for All of Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate TV series on the issue of Untouchability.
Amy Ziering is an American film producer and director. Mostly known for her work in documentary films, she is a regular collaborator of director Kirby Dick; they co-directed 2002's Derrida and 2020's On the Record, with Ziering also producing several of Dick's films.
Julia Pimsleur is an author, scaling coach, speaker and entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Million Dollar Women, an organization dedicated to helping one million women entrepreneurs reach $1MM in annual revenue, author of the best-selling book Million Dollar Women: The Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs Who Want to Go Big,Go Big Now, and the founder of Million Dollar Women Network. She is also the founder and CEO of the Little Pim language education system, as well as a former documentary filmmaker. She is the daughter of Paul Pimsleur, who was a scholar of applied linguistics.
Connie Field is an American film director known for her work in documentaries.
Jason DaSilva is an American and Canadian documentary film director, producer, writer, and a disability rights community member best known for the Emmy Award-winning documentary, When I Walk. The Emmy award-winning film follows his diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis for seven years as he progresses from cane, to walker, to wheelchair. He is also the founder of the non-profit organization AXS Lab and of AXS Map, a crowd sourced Google map based platform which rates the accessibility of businesses.
Robert Rippberger is an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter. He is the director of the upcoming sci-fi movie, Renner, producer of The Inventor, writer/director of Those Who Walk Away (film) starring BooBoo Stewart, the director/producer of Strive with Oscar winner Danny Glover, the director of the feature documentary Public Enemy Number One (film) from Executive Producer Ice-T, and director/producer of the Hulu released documentary 7 Days in Syria. Robert executive produced with Jason Blum the feature documentary Alive and Kicking. The film was sold to Magnolia Pictures and Netflix after its debut at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival, where it received a Grand Jury nomination.
Stopping Traffic is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Sadhvi Siddhali Shree and produced by the team of monks at Siddhayatan Tirth.
Nanfu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film Hooligan Sparrow premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, I Am Another You, premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2017 and won two special jury awards, and her third film, One Child Nation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Wang is the recipient of a 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking, from the Vilcek Foundation.
Fyre Fraud is a 2019 American documentary film about the fraudulent Fyre Festival, a 2017 music festival in the Bahamas. Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, it premiered on January 14, 2019, on Hulu.
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon is an American documentary filmmaker. She is known for producing and editing films on cultural and social issues. In 2018, she was invited to become a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
The Elephant Queen is a 2018 documentary film directed by Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble, and narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor. It tells the journey of a family of elephants in the African savannah when they are forced to leave their waterhole. The film was produced by Lucinda Englehart under the banner of Deeble & Stone.
A Thousand Cuts is a 2020 Philippine-American documentary film about Maria Ressa, the founder of the online news site Rappler. Directed by Ramona Diaz, it explores the conflicts between the press and the Filipino government under President Rodrigo Duterte.
76 Days is a 2020 Chinese-American documentary film directed by Hao Wu, Weixi Chen and an anonymous third. Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it captures the struggles and human resilience in the battle to survive the spread of the disease in Wuhan, China.
Katy Gale Chevigny is an American documentary filmmaker. She has produced or directed more than 30 documentary films and won a number of awards for her work.
