CPB seeks to enhance the capacity of public radio stations and national radio production organizations to create high quality multimedia journalism on important topics in education. CPB is seeking grant proposals for innovative original reporting that highlights challenges and solutions in American communities as they provide education in the 21st century. In particular, CPB seeks to support public radio stations and national producers in the creation of content that aligns with the American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen initiative, which addresses the high school dropout crisis in our country.

Public radio's capacity to create in-depth reporting on dropout and other topics can raise awareness of important issues and help communities and the nation better understand and address the challenges of providing education in a diverse society where technology and resources are not evenly distributed. Public radio journalism can use broadcast, online, mobile and social media as well as community engagement to explore the people, places and policies that influence America's classrooms. CPB anticipates awarding up to $1 million in grants to support stations and national producers in providing this type of coverage.

The Projects CPB will support must clearly demonstrate their ability to:
Build public media capacity for original education reporting;
Increase citizen understanding of education challenges and solutions and encourage community dialogue; and,
Position public media as a primary source of trusted and reliable information on topics critical to local communities, particularly in education related topics.

Application and more at http://www.cpb.org/grants/grant.php?id=405

October Events at UnionDocs:

My Brooklyn with Kelly Anderson

Sunday, October 7 at 7:30pm

Suggested donation $9

My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson’s journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Fulton Mall, a bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district that – despite its status as the third most profitable shopping area in New York City – is maligned for its inability to appeal to the affluent residents who have come to live around it. As a hundred small businesses are replaced by high rise luxury housing and chain retail, Anderson uncovers the web of global corporations, politicians and secretive public-private partnerships that drive seemingly natural neighborhood change. The film’s ultimate question is increasingly relevant on a global scale: who has a right to live in cities and determine their future?

Control Group: Shorts presented with Video Data Bank

Sunday, October 28 at 7:30pm

Suggested donation $9

This program of experimental videos presented by the Video Data Bank explores the natural world around us and how humans attempt to measure and control it.  The artists turn their cameras toward natural environments and human built spaces to explore the intersections between the two.

Upcoming September Events at UnionDocs:

Running Stumbled: A benefit screening for John Maringouin

Saturday, September 22 at 7

Sliding scale donation $10-20

Prologue with Raed Rafei

Sunday, September 30 at 7:30pm

$9 suggested donation.

The Organist is a monthly experimental arts-and-culture program hosted and distributed by KCRW. The editors of the award-winning monthly magazine the Believer, published in San Francisco by McSweeney's, will produce ten annual episodes of the podcast, which includes richly sound designed, eccentric audio documentaries, comic radio drama, un-fusty reviews, narrative field recordings, more. The scope of the podcast will reflect that of the print edition: its contributors take a thoughtful approach to pop culture, along with an irreverent attitude toward the highbrow. From philosophy to daytime TV, from poetry to martial arts, the show scrutinizes and interrogates the world with an affectionate and rigorous intelligence. Pieces from the podcast will grow out of stories in the magazine, and vice versa. Far from functioning as a supplementary appendage of the magazine, the show aims to become a cultural institution in its own right, discovering and developing a new generation of artists and musicians, writers and comedians. Weaving together the voices of its contributors, which include the brightest talents in literature and the arts, the Organist is an elegant, impressionistic, funny, and sharp cultural magazine that itself becomes an object of inquiry, discussion, and wonder.

We're looking for contributions of between zero and twenty minutes, preferably closer to four. Four minutes is the sweet spot. Any format will be considered, but the best thing you could send would be a radio documentary that doesn't have a twee or self-serious narration that uses sound in an intelligent way that introduces us to a new corner or aspect of the world, whether that world be cultural, political, literary, sociological, artistic, scientific, musical, anthropological, cinematic, or all ten. Send a brief bio, a handful of clips, and a pitch (or link to audio) to organist@believermag.com.

The podcast will launch December 1 at KCRW.org and believermag.com and iTunes and &c &c. We will pay our contributors mellow independent publishing rates TBD.

Join us for the 2012 September evening of Rough Cuts

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 at 7:30 p.m.
$9 admission
Complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided
At
Ninth Street Independent Film Center
145 Ninth Street, between Mission and Howard, San Francisco

To attend, please RSVP by noon on Tuesday, September 25th to roughcutsrsvp@yahoo.com

The Idiocratic Life
Directed by Kent Kessinger

Are utopias doomed to failure? Are Thoreau and his children—Eugene V. Debs, the ‘60s, Skinner—nothing more than the stuff of textbooks barely read in undergraduate seminars?

Kent Kessinger’s “The Idiocratic Life”–a stylishly shot look at counter-culture today—attempts to answer this question, by capturing the faces, stories, and inner struggles of members of communes in America.  In the process, Kessinger shines a light on pockets of America rarely seen in film, or anywhere else, and proves that, far from the media’s spotlight, great social experiments—from egalitarianism to anarchy—continue to percolate, and, in some cases, even thrive.

Moderator: Kelly Duane de la Vega

Kelly Duane de la Vega’s documentaries have been screened in film festivals around the world and broadcast on PBS stations and on the Documentary Channel. Her Emmy nominated “Monumental: David Brower’s Fight for Wild America” opened theatrically nationwide and is part of the curriculum in more than 50 universities worldwide. Her most recent documentary “Better This World” (POV, 2011) premiered at SXSW and was awarded Best Documentary by both San Francisco International Film Festival and Sarasota Film Festival.

For more information about the evening and Rough Cuts in general, visit http://sfroughcuts.com/nextevent.html

Rough Cuts

Rough Cuts is a series of work-in-progress documentary screenings that are produced every other month at various locations throughout San Francisco. For each evening, we screen one rough cut of a long-form documentary and then moderate a conversation about the film. These post-screening discussions are designed to give the filmmaker a better, more objective sense of what is working and not working with his/her film, with particular attention paid to improving the film’s structure and narrative clarity. We hope that the series also provides a welcome space for local filmmakers, film professionals, and fans of documentary film to meet and talk.