It has been an amazing week for the Visions to Peace Project. We premiered our new documentary, Vision is our Power, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on Wednesday, March 26. The following day, we showed it to the youth at the ARCH Evening Reporting Center, where we do workshops every Thursday evening. Two ERC staff – Juan Thompson and Bruce Cureton Bey — are in the documentary. And, they have some really powerful and profound things to say.
Today, Friday, March 28, we will be at Metro TeenAIDS’ FreeStyle Youth Center to screen the film for the youth and staff there. We had a couple of shoots at Metro TeenAIDS during production of the film — an open mic where the song that opens the movie was sung by Neshea Jamison aka Sheabutter(fly) — and group interview with three young men whose stories and perspectives open and close the film.
Stories shared by youth in the documentary will also be featured in the opening of an exhibit on youth and violence prevention next week at Children’s National Medical Center here in Washington, D.C. The exhibit reception is Thursday, April 3rd, 5:30 – 7:30 pm. Visitors will be able to sit at interactive listening stations set up on laptop computers to view and hear stories from the project. I’ll be posting more details on this soon. Right now, this interactive multimedia installation will only be available at listening stations during the opening reception. The hospital needs desktop computers with large monitors to keep the listening stations up for the entire three months of the exhibition. Please let us know if you have the resources — e.g. computers to loan — to help make this happen. We would love to have the stations set up on Mac desktops with cameras built into the monitor so youth who visit the listening stations can add their own stories and visions.
In the midst of all of these screenings, we’re also still doing some post-production — mixing and mastering the sound, replacing a few clips, small touches….
For those of you who have seen the film already, please give us your feedback. We really want to hear from you and know what you think.
The feedback we have been given so far from folks that have come up to us after the screenings and people who’ve written us in emails has been really humbling. We’ve been getting requests from organizations to screen the film at their events and questions about when the DVD will be ready for distribution. It’s coming, y’all.
In the meantime, please us know your thoughts!
