Jacksonville Film Festival 2009

“Free To Be Me” is a short documentary which follows a group of 50 kids, ages 10-17, most of whom are on the Autism Spectrum, during a two-week filmmaking camp with Director Joey Travolta in Jacksonville, Florida. The film takes a behind-the-scenes look at the camp and the making of a series of public service announcements--written, acted, directed, and produced by the campers. The story shows how a group of kids working with a team of Hollywood film professionals, University of North Florida volunteers, and a community of families, can inspire the world by creating short films of their own.

This is a story about Apple your typical fruity guy. Trying to live his life like a normal Apple; hold a job, have friends etc... but his tree mates try to hold him back from achieving his normal life.In this episode Apple, tries to go to work but ends up being Chased by Grape, Banana and Barky the Tree in which they all reside.It becomes a race against the odds as Apple's fruitmobile is pit against Barky's long legs.The story comes to a climax as the characters finally reach the 'finish line', and the unimaginable happens.

A dad talks with his son about growing up.

A gentleman walks in to a gynecologist office for a rather interesting doctor’s visit.

On a quiet night's visit to his local coffee shop, a young artist discovers something rather amazing - the most beautiful woman in the world might have a crush on him. If only there was a way to know for sure... Jacksonville

The Art Institute of Jacksonville

The 20th century Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits re-defined black history and black people, making it possible for a people formerly despised as “Negroes” to pride themselves as African-Americans. Yet along the way, he undercut the work of African American social scientists, dismissing their work as ‘non-objective’, laden with political agenda. The great irony is that in the end, Herskovits own work would inspire manyBlack Power activists of the late 1960s. Brilliant, high-minded, pioneering, ambitious, Herskovits’ life and work raises questions powerfully relevant today. What is “objective study” and when does it become politicized? What happens when the scholar becomes the powerbroker? What are the consequences when we deny a people the right to define themselves? Who controls the production of knowledge, how and why? Bringing rarely seen archival footage together with interviews from leading scholars of race and culture, Herskovits At the Heart of Blackness depicts an ongoing struggle over who has the power to understand, describe and, ultimately, define the contours of human cultural history. What knowledge can a Palestinian contribute to Israeli history and Jewish self-identity? What can a German say with auhtority about Turkish culture and world view? How might being a powerful insider affect the depiction of the disenfranchised outsider? And to what purpose and effect?The film blends conventional interviews with original animation sequences, to give questions and ideas surprising urgency. The film’s dramatic reenactments were created using a “photo collage” technique inspired by Chris Marker’s film “La Jette” (basis for the Hollywood sci-fi thriller “12 Monkeys”). Hundreds of photographs were used to create these dramatic sequences. Creative editing takes the viewer back and forth between the historical and the contemporary, to bend and sometimes break the “fourth wall’ and remind the viewer that the film itself with its own politics and point of view – is part of the discourse we are asking the viewer to investigate. Vital Pictures producers Llew Smith and Christine Herbes-Sommers are winners with California Newsreel of the 2009 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for their series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick. Their newest documentary Herskovits At the Heart of Blackness will premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens in the 2009-10 season. Their documentaries have tackled race ideologies (Race: The Power of an Illusion); how economic injustice creates unequal health, especially for people of color (Unnatural Causes) and the politics of the production of knowledge (Herskovits At the Heart of Blackness). Vital Pictures creates films that engage social justice issues through careful research and inventive storytellling, that stimulate and illuminate wider audiences.

What is HIV? What is AIDS? What is being done to cure it? These questions sent filmmaker Brent Leung on a worldwide journey, from the highest echelons of the medical research establishment to the slums of South Africa, where death and disease are the order of the day. In this up-to-the-minute documentary, he observes that although AIDS has been front-page news for over 27 years, it is barely understood. Despite the great effort, time, and money spent, no cure is in sight.Born in 1980 (on the cusp of the epidemic), Leung reveals a research establishment in disarray, and health policy gone tragically off course. Gaining access to a remarkable array of the most prominent and influential figures in the field -- among them the co-discoverers of HIV, presidential advisors, Nobel laureates, and the Executive Director of UNAIDS, as well as survivors and activists -- his restrained approach yields surprising revelations and stunning contradictions.The HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten, and this is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players -- in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. If, as South African health advocate Pephsile Maseko remarks, this is the beginning of a war...a war to reclaim our health, then 'House of Numbers' could well be the opening salvo in the battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic clearly gone awry.