***BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY AWARD AT MOREHOUSE COLLEGE HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL***

James Rutenbeck 

Director/Writer/Editor

James Rutenbeck is a two-time recipient of the Alfred I. du Pont Columbia Journalism Award for his work as episodic producer of the PBS series, Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us  Sick? (2008), about health disparities in the U.S. and Class of ’27 (2016), which he executive produced, directed and edited. Class of ’27, which explores the lives of young children in three rural American communities, aired on the World Channel series America Reframed and streams as Editor’s Pick at The Atlantic. James’ films have screened at Cinema du Reel, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery, Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival and Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. His feature film Scenes from a Parish, about cultural change at a working-class Catholic parish, aired on Independent Lens in 2009. A Reckoning in Boston premiered at the 2021 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and has been screened at many festivals, including Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival, where it won Best Feature Documentary. The Sundance Documentary Fund, LEF Moving Image Fund, Southern Humanities Media Fund and Corporation for Public Broadcasting have supported James’ films. Editing credits include the forthcoming NYTimes Op Doc Disability Road Map Project and God in America, Zoot Suit Riots, Jimmy Carter and Roberto Clemente for the PBS series American Experience and American Denial and Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness for Independent Lens. James was a 2019/20 Fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University and 2021 Poynter Fellow at Yale University.

Carl Chandler 

Producer

Carl is a baby boomer, a product of the Sixties. He was born in Boston, as was his grandmother, father, two daughters and a grandson. His ancestry is Black, Indigenous American and western European. He made the calculation early in life that he did not want to be a full participant in the so-called "American dream" since he felt that his people were not respected or embraced by America. As a consequence, he feels his education was incomplete. His lifestyle choices did not include lots of money. Originally poor by choice, then by necessity, he sees himself as poor but not impoverished. Throughout his life he has been able to give lectures and presentations on Indigenous culture in southern New England, which he believes is a small contribution to young people’s education. When his youngest daughter went away to college, he struggled with what to do next. A year later he found the Clemente Course in the Humanities. There, he received a first-rate education and a new direction in his life. He was elected class graduation speaker, and this honor confirmed to him that he should speak to the positive impact Clemente has on a person’s life. He has spoken in videos, public forums and small classes. This is his first film.

P.H. O'Brien 

Cinematographer

P.H. O’Brien has a long career of shooting and producing documentary films and TV shows. Among P.H.'s many director-of-photography/producer credits are Steve James' (Hoop Dreams) Reel Paradise, Head Games and The War Tapes (Best Documentary, Tribeca 2006). He shot and produced Bad Voodoo’s War for Frontline on PBS, the MTV show How’s Your News? and Earth Made of Glass for HBO, which was nominated for a producers guild award and winner of a 2012 Peabody Award. His documentary Six Days to Air... The Making of South Park was nominated for an Emmy.

Allie Humenuk 

Cinematographer

Allie Humenuk is an award-winning filmmaker and Emmy-nominated cinematographer whose films have been broadcast nationally and internationally. Her most recent film, The Guys Next Door (co-director, co-producer, and cinematographer), had long and successful festival runs and aired on PBS. Her previous feature documentary, Shadow of the House (director, producer, and cinematographer), about the photographer Abelardo Morell, was heralded as “one of the best films ever made about an artist and the artistic process” by Bo Smith, former curator of the film program at the MFA Boston. Her first film, Love Knots, was shot on 16mm film and was nominated for a student Academy Award. Allie was nominated for an Emmy for her camera work on the PBS series Design Squad. Her other cinematography and camera credits include programs for HBO, BBC, PBS, National Geographic, MTV, and ESPN. She has taught film and video production at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art and the Maine Media Workshops. Currently, Allie freelances as a director and cinematographer.

Nate May 

Composer

Nate is a composer and performer whose interest in human ecosystems has driven explorations into sounds and interactions. Raised in West Virginia, much of his work stems from a deep engagement with the art and culture of Appalachia.This includes his oratorio State, a setting of interviews Nate conducted with Appalachian migrants while on a fellowship from the Berea Sound Archives. Nate is an accomplished keyboardist and improviser as well as an electronic musician and producer. He has collaborated with Paris-based choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu on the world-touring work Spiral. While in South Africa on a Reese Miller scholarship from the Telluride Association, he worked with the indigenous experimental trio Khoi Khonnexion on their debut album Kalahari Waits. His work has been performed by world-renowned ensembles, including International Contemporary Ensemble and Ensemble Dal Niente. He is a teaching artist with the American Composers Orchestra and is on faculty at Montclair State University. He is also on faculty at the Walden School where he was awarded the 2018 Arno and Ruth Drucker Faculty Chair

Llewellyn Smith 

Executive Producer

For thirty years, Llewellyn Smith’s award-winning documentaries have explored a range of social justice topics, including race relations and racial identity, American slavery, Reconstruction, health inequities, civil rights, community organizing and childhood trauma in impoverished neighborhoods. For the PBS series NOVA, Llew served as director/ producer of Poisoned Water (2017), an investigation of the Flint water crisis, which was awarded the Kavli Foundation Science Journalism Award. He directed the film Herskovits At The Heart Of Blackness (2010), examining the consequences of race identity politics. Llew was an executive producer for the PBS series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008)—a look at how social and economic conditions determine determining health and longevity. Filmmaking honors include the George Foster Peabody Award, the Council On Foundation’s Henry Hampton Award, the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Journalism Award, the John O'Connor Film Award of the American Historical Association, the Eric Barnouw Award, the Hollywood Black Film Festival Best Documentary Award and multiple Writer’s Guild and Emmy nomination.

Anne Marie Stein

Executive Producer

Anne Marie Stein has worked with independent media artists for over 30 years. She is currently VP (of most stuff) at Winikur Productions. From 2005-2019 she was Dean of Professional and Continuing Education at The Massachusetts College of Art. Previously she was a Director of Development for Northern Light Productions, where she managed business development and co-produced and co-directed the feature documentary The Dhamma Brothers. Anne Marie was Executive Director of the Boston Film/Video Foundation from 1987 to 2001 where she expanded support and recognition for moving image artists. She served on the Executive Committee of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, was a co-founder of the Boston International Festival for Women’s Cinema and co-director of the New England Film and Video Festival.

Diana Fischer

Co-Producer

Diana Fischer has 30 years of experience producing and writing for film and other media. At GBH in Boston, she worked on projects including Emmy award-winning segments on Japan for News Hour, profiles of Tip O’Neill and Vladimir Posner and art programming with John Sayles. She also wrote scripts for the Emmy Award-winning children’s series Peep and the Big Wide World and produced short history and science films with the GBH Interactive Projects department. As consultant to Sundance Multimedia, Diana worked on environmentalism web sites and museum installations. At web magazine iCast, she wrote and produced streaming video interviews with notables including author Tom Perrotta, musician/film composer Mark Mothersbaugh and Paris food writer Patricia Wells. Diana also wrote book and film review columns for the web site Offsprung. At Lost Nation Pictures, she served as Story Editor of the Alfred I. du Pont Columbia Journalism Award winning film Class of ’27.

In 2019 I drove to Maine with Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler for meetings with industry professionals at the Camden International Film Festival. We met with Noland Walker, Vice President of Content at ITVS, who had viewed some excerpts. Noland spoke candidly about the film’s shortcomings. He told me unless I made myself as vulnerable as Kafi and Carl had for me, the film would be “like every other film of its kind.”

I had first imagined Reckoning as an observational film. I conceived it as a year in the lives of students in the Clemente Course, a rigorous tuition-free night class in the humanities. I vowed to keep my distance and let the students tell their own stories. But long before we met with Noland, I’d been struggling with the film. My editing attempts, however focused, seemed to be leading nowhere. Despite several workshop screenings, I was at a loss.

On the ride back from Camden, Kafi asked me if I was afraid to enter into the film and make myself  truly vulnerable. Her words first chilled and then lit a fire under me.

Kafi formed a working group to help me develop my character voice. I collected my thoughts and started processing the consequential events I had witnessed over four years of filmmaking. There was the time Kafi had been evicted and invited me to Housing Court where dozens of poor people face eviction every week, most with no legal support. I accompanied her to an agency that had for weeks threatened to cut off her housing subsidy. But when we both showed up, two nervous white men took us to a conference room and told us the issue had been resolved in Kafi’s favor.

At another point, Carl’s landlord told him he would have to move out any day, as she was putting his space on the market as a condo. As a month-to-month tenant he had no recourse and as the primary caregiver for his young grandson, the prospect of an abrupt move was devastating.

Although I had planned to anchor the film in the personal transformations of the Clemente students, I came to realize ever-present structural racism was something I could no longer ignore. I’d been oblivious to the dark underside of beautiful, cosmopolitan Boston’s development boom and had failed to validate the lived experience of people I had grown to know as friends. I hadn’t really understood the lives of low-income people of color and had failed to recognize my own complicity in the structures that were holding them back.

Processing all this and entering into the film with my own character voice required patience, time and support from a team of people of color who had my back: Kafi, Carl, Noland, Llewellyn Smith and two friends of Kafi, Tolga Shields and Fernando Ona. Stepping back, there’s some irony in a white suburban filmmaker being encouraged to find and value his voice by people whose stories he had set out to mediate. I hope that is evident to viewers of A Reckoning in Boston.