Heart of the Nation chronicles the indomitable spirit of everyday Americans emerging during the changes wrought by the economic crisis of 2009, which is concurrently generating momentum in the move towards creating a truly sustainable way of life.

                                                                                            Illustration by Matt Carless 2009

CONCEPT

For the documentary prospectus contact

encounterentertainment@gmail.com

Karen: 818.235.8590

"I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope. Nothing's going to change in this country as long as everyone's so well fed. What it takes for a revolution is hunger and passion. There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s which we have not yet approached in the present recession".

                                                                                         A Conversation with Lawrence Ferlinghetti By Jeff Troiano 2003

During early 2009 filmmaker Karen Borger joined the rank and file of many living in America impacted by the economic collapse sweeping the nation.

In the spirit of photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange, who chronicled the impact of the Great Depression with striking images of migratory farm workers, Borger will take to the road and travel across America during late August to the end of September 2009, documenting the effects of the economic crisis on both rural and city-bound Americans and the resultant growing environmental awareness effecting positive change.

The primary aim of gathering the photographs and documentary film is to record an insightful, heartfelt ‘ties that bind’ story of the resilience of the American people during this time of hardship and the acceptance by so many of the need to rethink the future of the planet, as seen through the eyes of an Antipodean and new US resident.

Those from Main Street, Wall Street, back alley, field workers, factory hands, musicians, artists, poets, writers and a breadth of the community who are all fighting with dignity, a sense of inspired possibility and humor to make life bearable and worth living shall feature in the film and photographic series. 

In small-town Elkin, North Carolina, wood furniture manufacturer Vaughan Bassett founded their factory in 1919. The company has been a steady employer for many generations of townsfolk.

 The doors to the factory closed Friday, January 30, 2009. 
Employees of 40 years were given just 3 weeks severance pay.

This has put 400 of the 5000 residents of Elkin out of work including Pat, an employee of 18 years.  Then there’s Dale & Amanda Easter who joined the factory workforce straight out of school at 16 and have a I-year-old baby: both young parents are unemployed and facing eviction from their rental home.

Now rumors have started that another factory in town, Interface, is also looking to close its doors in the near future.

What are Pat, Dale & Amanda, their co-workers and all the other townsfolk doing?  How is the community pulling together? Will these changes take into account the environment?

This is an opportunity to tell their story and reveal that they too like so many others across this amazing country are the Heart of the Nation...

    Currently Seeking Funding & Sponsorship for      

•    An Alternative Fuel, Hybrid or Electric Car

•    Solar-Powered Equipment

•    Recycled fabric T-Shirts, Hats & Camping Equipment

•  Organic Food Suppliers & Water Filters

ENVIRONMENTAL STANDPOINT

'The challenge facing modern society is to bring itself into a state of ecological sustainability.  In terms of terrestrial sustainability, this will require reestablishing networks of large and connected natural vegetation throughout all landscapes, some strictly protected and some under benign management, sufficient to guarantee upscale sustainability of ecosystem functions and protect biodiversity. 

In the overdeveloped World this will require restoring and reconnecting landscape’s natural ecosystem matrix.  In the World’s few remaining and globally critical large and intact ecosystems, such as the Earth’s last forest wildernesses, development must occur in a manner that maintains landscape patterns of vegetational patch size, adjacencies and connectivity. 

Protected and ecologically based community development initiatives must be extensive enough relative to more intensively managed areas to adequately sustain the integrity of ecosystem processes upon which all life depends.
 
No human imperative surpasses in urgency the need to protect, conserve and restore natural ecosystems'.   

The following links are to articles and documents commenting on aspects of the economic crisis.

• Obama Sees ‘Glimmers of Hope’ of Improving Economy
• Green Chip Stocks Soar
• Detroit UnReal Estate Agency
  
• States hit hard by Economic Downturn
• Biden to Lead Task Force on Issues of the Middle Class 
• Tale of Colesburg, iowa, a town that the economic downturn forgot
• Joblessness rises to 16 year high
• One Bale At A Time 
  

 

Certain artists, poets, musicians, photographers and filmmakers serve as inspiration for this documentary project. A few are noted here.

In the beginning, there was Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971).One of the trailblazers in 20th century photojournalism, Bourke-White played an historic role in media and womens history. 

In addition to her professional contributions, her activism on behalf of the poor and underprivileged throughout the world places her among the foremost humanitarians of the century. Margaret Bourke White joined with other artists to form the American Artists’ Congress that advocated state and public support for the arts and fought discrimination.  

 “It is my own conviction that defense of the economic needs, as well as their liberty of artistic expression, will inevitably draw closer the struggle of the great masses of American people for security and the abundant life which they are more than anxious to earn by productive work.”      

                                       Margaret Bourke-White in The Nation magazine. Feb 19, 1936

.

Fifty People, One Question

A brilliant series of vox pops from Crush + Lovely

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poet, publisher, painter & bookstore owner.

As a poet, his A Coney Island of the Mind is considered a classic of the 20th century. As a publisher, his decision to produce Allen Ginsberg's Howl challenged the censors and ultimately reaffirmed our First Amendment rights. As a painter, he continues to produce fresh, provocative, sensitively rendered "statements" that convey his message as much as any poem. And as a bookseller, City Lights is America's most famous bookstore—a mecca for book-minded visitors from around the world.

JOHN STEINBECK

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

The book documents the US road trip he took with his French standard poodle Charley around the country in 1960.

Steinbeck traveled throughout the US in a specially-made camper named "Rocinante" after the horse of Don Quixote.  He started his travels in Long Island, NY roughly following the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in CA, over to Texas, up through the Deep South, and back to New York, a trip encompassing nearly 10,000 miles.

 In the book Steinbeck expresses uncertainty about the future, rapid technological and political changes. He mentions the wastefulness of American cities and society, and the large amount of refuse as a result of everything being "packaged".

Short Film about Movies by Errol Morris

Cool, up beat studio cyc' variation of interviews with a very select the vox populi form the guru of stylish docs.

ALISTAIRE COOK - LETTERS FROM AMERICA

Alistaire Cooke began what was to become a permanent emigration from the UK in 1937, although his claim for citizenship took over four years to be processed. He swore the Oath of Allegiance on 1 December, 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Shortly after emigrating, Cooke suggested to the BBC the idea of doing the London Letter in reverse: a 15-minute talk for British listeners on life in America.

During this time, Cooke undertook a journey through the whole United States, recording the lifestyle of ordinary Americans during the war – and their reactions to it. Accompanied by strong reviews, it stands as the only incisive first-hand journal of the American homefront ever published,  albeit confined to the early stages of the war.

The first American Letter was broadcast March 24, 1946. The series came to an end 58 years (2,869 installments) later, in March 2004.

Alistair Cooke said that, of all his work, Alistair Cooke's America was that of which he was most proud; it is the result and expression of his long love of America.

 WIM WENDERS

"Lounge paintings Gila Bend, Arizona" 

'Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren't alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking. There's a distinct kind of satisfaction that you get from looking and traveling alone, and it's connected with this relation of solitude to photography. 
I'd get up in the morning and drive off into the blue and just keep driving all day... Those two beautiful cameras, my Leica and the Makina, with their different functions. Really there were the three of us on that trip..."

                                                                                                                   -  Wim Wenders

RICHARD AVEDON

Richard Avedon shooting his American West series

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

 - Jack Kerouac

 Freedoms just another word for nothin' left to lose,  

And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but its free,

Feelin' good was easy, lord, when bobby sang the blues, 

And buddy, that was good enough for me,

Detroit, has been home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, Detroit sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.
Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah. Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee.

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.
In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline.

The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

APRIL 10, 2009

President Barack Obama said the U.S. economy is “starting to see progress” toward recovery even as it is “still under severe stress.”

The unemployment rate rose to 8.5 percent in March, the highest level since 1983, and employers have cut payrolls by 5.1 million workers since the start of the downturn, the worst performance in the postwar era.

The economy probably shrank at a 5 percent annual rate in the first quarter, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey earlier this month.

But there are signs of economic improvement. Orders placed with factories rose 1.8 percent in February, the first gain since July. Purchases of existing homes rose 5.1 percent to an annual rate of 4.72 million in February amid lower prices. 

FEBRUARY 2009

Unemployment climbed to 7.5 percent, and payrolls fell by 530,000, the 13th consecutive decrease, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey ahead of Labor Department figures Feb. 6. Other reports may show manufacturing, services and housing shrank further, signaling more firings ahead.*

The most materially prosperous culture in human history is overshooting the carrying capacity of its ecosystems, with devastating effects upon many species including humans.  Consumption in North America has come at the cost of over-development of natural ecological systems; harming species, destroying ecosystems, and adversely changing evolutionary patterns.**

The jobless rate in the U.S. probably jumped in January to the highest level in 16 years as slumping sales forced employers to slash staff. *

The economy contracted at a 3.8 percent annual rate last quarter as consumer spending continued to slide. The slump caused unsold goods to pile up, indicating more cutbacks are in the offing.*

“The labor market will look terrible for a while,” said Sung Won Sohn, a professor of economics and finance at California State University Channel Islands, in Camarillo, California. “If the downward momentum is not arrested, the consequences could be disastrous. Policy makers need to act quickly.”*

The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 32.5 in January, the lowest level since 1980, from a reading of 32.9 the prior month, according to the survey median. A reading of 50 is the dividing line between growth and contraction.*

This week’s report may also show manufacturers cut 143,000 jobs following a reduction of 149,000 in December that was the biggest since 2001. *

One major drag is housing, now in its fourth year of a slump as home values fall and foreclosures surge. The National Association of Realtors’ index of pending home sales was unchanged in December following a string of three consecutive declines, according to the median forecast ahead of a report due Feb. 3.*

“The recession is deepening and the urgency of our economic crisis is growing,” said Obama, who is pressing to boost spending on infrastructure projects and lower taxes to create and save jobs. The House passed an $819 billion stimulus plan last week, shifting attention to the Senate*