Using Our Documentaries in Your Community:

• Host a screening in your home: Buy the documentaries that interest you; then invite friends and family to join you for a communal dinner and video screening. Download the corresponding Discussion Guides from the Learn More pages of our website to help you focus the conversation afterwards.
  
  
• Organize a film series in your community: Join together with friends, neighbors, or co-workers to offer viewings and discussions on issues of interest in your community or workplace. If you have concerns about differences of opinion, remember that fresh information and face-to-face dialogue can help to heal the rifts that divide us. A skilled facilitator can help you manage controversial discussions in a way that feels safe and fair to everyone.
  
  
• Ask teachers at your high school or professors at your college to show one or more of our documentaries to their classes: We offer helpful resources on a host of topics (see our Learn More pages for specific suggestions). Again, our Discussion Guides can help you explore underlying issues. Or, one of our films could be paired with a talk by a visiting speaker. (The Student Environmental Action Coalition, a national network run by students and youth, offers young “experts” who are available to speak on various topics. See www.seac.org/speakers.)
  
  
• Ask religious leaders to screen our videos, perhaps in cooperation with other local congregations. Together, they might wish to sponsor a film series with guest speakers or educators. (Independent Voices for the 21st Century offers a roster of speakers. See www.ippn.org.)
  
  
• Invite your parents and grandparents to join you in watching our documentaries on “Aging and the Human Spirit.” Arrange to have these shown at your local library or community center, or at a nearby retirement community or assisted-living residence.
  
  
• Ask your local library to buy our videos and make them available for circulation. Contact us if you or they need help creating display literature.
  
  
• Ask your local bookstore to stock our videos and display them prominently. Contact us about bulk-order discounts and display materials.
  

Using Our Documentaries As a Study Series

Aging and the Human Spirit - Viewers of all ages will appreciate the opportunity to share their hopes and fears about aging by responding to these videos in small groups where they can talk comfortably.

• Grow Old Along With Me honors the aging process by celebrating its creative possibilities.
  
  
• Life Stories will inspire you, no matter what your age, to claim your own life story—perhaps in the company of a writing group. (To learn more about how to do this, visit: www.utmb.edu/agingspirit/shareyourlive.htm.)

Connecting the Dots - This Cine Golden Eagle Award-winning series shows how policies carried out by the industrialized world create poverty and suffering in the developing world. These documentaries are thought-provoking resources on the global dimensions of social and environmental justice. (Read a review of this series by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, PhD.) www.olddogdocumentaries.com/down_cd_review.pdf

• Arms For The Poor explains how U.S. weapons sales to developing nations lead those countries to squander money that could be spent on food, education, and health care. (26 min./Discussion Guide available)
  
  
• Birdsong and Coffee: A Wake Up Call encourages us, as consumers, to consider the social, economic, and environmental consequences of our buying habits. (56 min. in two 28-min. segments/Discussion Guide available)
  
  
• Cancel The Debt, Now! unmasks the suffering caused by policies that force poor countries to pay rich countries exorbitant interest on 30-year-old loans—many of which were wasted to begin with or went into the pockets of corrupt dictators. (22 min./Discussion Guide available)
  
  
• Coming To Say Goodbye: Stories of AIDS in Africa dramatizes the disastrous results of policies that leave people alone, penniless, and hopeless in the face of devastating disease. It helps us understand that poverty is the primary reason for the spread of AIDS in Africa. (27 min./Discussion Guide available)
  
  
• The Global Banquet: Politics of Food explains why ordinary people, at home and abroad, can no longer feed themselves when “free-trade” policies allow multinational corporations to control the world’s food supply. (56 min. in two 28 min. segments/Discussion Guide available)
  

Family Values? - It is quite impossible to watch these three documentaries without opening our hearts to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. These are transformative resources for teaching and reconciliation.

• Eve's Daughters shows how five lesbian women—a painter, a writer, a performance artist, a teacher, and a massage therapist—use their arts to heal the split between sexuality and spirituality. (27 min.)
  
  
• Maybe We’re Talking About a Different God demonstrates that culture wars can be won by transforming fear—that approach is everything. (27 min.)
  
  
• Your Mom's a Lesbian, Here's Your Lunch, Have a Good Day at School. This affectionate biography of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr proves that acceptance and love trump alienation and intolerance any day. (27 min.)
  
  

Prophetic Voices - Every age has its prophets—those who summon us to a broader view that redefines our values, our priorities, and our place in the larger world. These documentaries bring a new perspective to some of the ethical and philosophical challenges of our time.

• Missing Peace: Women of Faith and the Failure of War introduces six women of different faiths (Jewish,Muslim, and Christian) who inspire us with their efforts to reclaim religion as a path to peace.
  
  
• William Sloane Coffin: A Lover's Quarrel With America. In this post-9/11 interview, Rev. Coffin challenges the motivation behind current U.S. policies. He calls us to “listen to our better angels” by confronting the true “axis of evil”—environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons.
  
  

Search for Spirituality - The complexity of today’s world has prompted a rethinking of old forms of spirituality while giving birth to new forms as well. This series considers some of the questions that are being asked and some of the answers that are being found.

• Rise Up and Walk: Filmed in five countries, this documentary offers a rare glimpse inside the new religious communities that are sweeping across Africa. Led by living prophet-healers who interpret Christianity in the light of pre-Christian traditions, these “spirit-based” communities could be “an historical turning point . . . as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation.” (55 min.)
  
  
• Search for Spirituality: Thich Nhat Hanh, Charlotte Joko Beck, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Matthew Fox, and Bede Griffiths lead us on a journey beyond the materialism of the dominant culture into a gentleness and fearlessness that come from awakening the heart. (56 min.).
  
  

If you would like help with resources, study guides, or additional ideas, please contact us.