Back in October, we premiered a trailer for a new documentary being produced on Burien, called “Where We Live Now, Burien.”

This documentary is still in production, and another clip has been released, this time focusing on Burien’s Skatepark located at SW 144th and 4th Ave SW, near the community center.

Here’s an intro for this segment from the Editor’s (Rowan North) YouTube Channel:

“This is a section from a working documentary about the power of community collaboration and grassroots democracy in Burien, Washington…”

Here’s the clip:

As we mentioned before, the crew behind this production includes many well-known Northwest video folks, such as:

• Executive Producer: Anne Stadler, community leadership consultant, formerly KING-TV5 documentaries and specials Producer
• Co-Producers and Writers: Terry Tazioli, writer/on-air Host, formerly with The Seattle Times, KING-TV5
• Lucy Mohl, formerly Senior Manager, Microsoft (and previously KING-TV, Film.com and RealNetworks)
• Production Manager, Videographer, Editor: Aaron Stadler, www.fatcatVDO.com
• Videographers: Bill Fenster, www.billfensterproductions.com
• Diana Wilmar, www.foxwilmar.com/bios/bios
• Videographer/Editor: Rowan North, LinkedIn
• Still Photographer: Kimi Milo
• Audio: Stevan Smith
• Scott MacLaughlin
• Robin Sarmento

This project is still in production, and like most productions-in-progress, is still seeking funds to complete it.

Executive Producer Anne Stadler says:

“We’re looking for at least $7,000. One thing we want to do is get this packaged with a series of discussion questions to market to Mayors and City governments around the state and country. So anything more that we raise, will go toward THAT. Haven’t budgeted for that yet.

Donations will go towards editing the doc, as well as producing a couple of shorter pieces: skate park and young people; Burien and BIAS.”

Here’s how you can help:

Send whatever you can to the Sunyata Foundation; all Donors will get their names in the credits, as well as a DVD of the video, along with the heartwarming knowledge that you helped promote Your Burien (keep in mind that this is a non-profit, 501-C3 organization):

Sunyata Foundation
PO Box 58788
Renton WA. 98058

As more elements get produced, we’ll preview clips here…so stay tuned to The B-Town Blog.

If you attended Burien’s Strawberry Festival, or the myriad of the many other B-Town events this past summer, you may have noticed a film crew (or four) wandering around, shooting footage for a new documentary about our little town.

Well, after months of shooting and editing, a trailer has been created for the production, entitled “Where We Live Now, Burien.”

Without further adieu, here is the 5:32 trailer for your enjoyment – watch closely, you may see yourself, someone you know as well as some of the places you go:

The crew behind this production includes many well-known Northwest video folks, such as:

• Executive Producer: Anne Stadler, community leadership consultant, formerly KING-TV5 documentaries and specials Producer
• Co-Producers and Writers: Terry Tazioli, writer/on-air Host, formerly with The Seattle Times, KING-TV5
• Lucy Mohl, formerly Senior Manager, Microsoft (and previously KING-TV, Film.com and RealNetworks)
• Production Manager, Videographer, Editor: Aaron Stadler, www.fatcatVDO.com
• Videographers: Bill Fenster, www.billfensterproductions.com
• Diana Wilmar, www.foxwilmar.com/bios/bios
• Videographer/Editor: Rowan North, LinkedIn
• Still Photographer: Kimi Milo
• Audio: Stevan Smith
• Scott MacLaughlin
• Robin Sarmento

Keep in mind though that this documentary remains unfinished, and like most productions-in-progress, is seeking funds to complete it.

Executive Producer Anne Stadler says:

“We’re looking for at least $7,000. One thing we want to do is get this packaged with a series of discussion questions to market to Mayors and City governments around the state and country. So anything more that we raise, will go toward THAT. Haven’t budgeted for that yet.

Donations will go towards editing the doc, as well as producing a couple of shorter pieces: skate park and young people; Burien and BIAS.”

Here’s how you can help:

Send whatever you can to the Sunyata Foundation; all Donors will get their names in the credits, as well as a DVD of the video, along with the heartwarming knowledge that you helped promote Your Burien (keep in mind that this is a non-profit, 501-C3 organization):

Sunyata Foundation
PO Box 58788
Renton WA. 98058

Here’s more info on the production from their press release:

“Where We Live Now: Burien” A Video Project

What does it take to have the resilience to rebound from an economic downturn by putting up art in an unfinished section of the Town Square and throwing a party??!!!

Burien’s story shows us what to pay attention to as we struggle to live well where we live!

We’ve shot a documentary and short videos illustrating how the leadership and vision of different groups in Burien, Washington create an emerging fabric of settlement.  Featured are artists; young people; the Town Square developers and other business people; new arrivals and old-timers.  We’re telling the story of how artists have helped Burien create a lively response to the setbacks caused by the current economic downtown and looking at the choices Burien is making to fulfill its aspirations.

There are several stories that have our attention:

1. Burien reacts to setbacks caused by the economic downturn by converting a negative space in the development of the Town Square into an opportunity to create a new story.  That story focuses around how Burning Man artists make up a new storyline in the aftermath of slowdown in proposed Burien development, using art to “construct” and convert an asphalt parking lot into a festive center (Burien Interim Art Space)–however temporary.  We look at how they are helping to pull Burien into a future people have invested in (bond issue), hoped for, and tried to attract.
2. Another story here is the usual one with an unusual angle:  Old timers, new settlers, struggling once again to create community rather than living “side by side”.  The Director of the Historical Association Cyndi Upthegrove is a great spokesperson for the need to create community between the old timers and the newcomers, etc. She asks: “Is Burien truly building on its heritage?” The first Mayor of Burien was a native of India, Arun Jhaveri, from Mumbai.  He still lives in Burien, is retired from Boeing.  He, along with Sally Nelson (the only original Council member still on the City Council) involved 700 citizens in creating the vision and operating principles that have guided Burien since incorporation in 1993.
3. Also, Burien’s young people enjoy a very fine skatepark built on the site of the City’s Community Center where many different ages and ethnicities congregate.  Young people asked city government to give them a place to skateboard; they worked with the Parks Dept., and a designer to create the skatepark.  We have an award-winning young filmmaker, Rowan North, who is part of the production team, who has shot and edited their story of how they fit into the evolving fabric of Burien.

Purpose:
This video project is part of a public conversation that is being spearheaded by www.Suddenly.org.   It shows a vital view from the nitty-gritty of living the changes and choices talked about in that conversation.  A description of that project, Suddenly.org is at the end of this proposal.

Burien’s own stories dramatically illustrate Suddenly’s basic thesis:  Our choices matter.  The landscape where we live now is the result of countless choices. Much of it is an in-between space, neither urban nor rural, but a mingling of both.  Suddenly.org is a digital commons hosting public conversations and events generated by artists, historians, urban planners, government and citizens who are engaging in an inquiry about how we came to BE where we live now, with the intention of creating a future that is “a landscape where we can ALL live, eyes wide open, without tragedy or regret.”

The Burien mosaic shows how one community self-organizes to achieve the intangible AND tangible things that matter in “a landscape where we can ALL live, eyes wide open…”  It brings to light all the elements of a healthy community.

Distribution Plans:
The entire enterprise is an accessible educational venture.

All products will be distributed via the Internet, via www.suddenly.org’s website, via television and other media.

We will also produce a DVD of the ½ hour documentary and the shorter stories, for sale.  Burien’s story will serve as a model for other communities, here and across the planet.  We will work with Burien Mayor Joan McGilton, former Mayor Arun Jahveri , and Jim Diers, community-building consultant, to produce a discussion guide that we will market to Mayors and city governments.

We hope to have a party in Burien when the documentary is completed.

How we will work together:
Members of the team working on this project are colleagues who have had many years of experience–together and separately– at KING-TV, Seattle, and other venues.  All participants are multi-award-winners in their own disciplines. We will work in the way Matthew Stadler and his colleagues have done in Suddenly.org.

Here is our commitment:
“This project depends on the generous hard work of talented people who, if they are paid at all, are never paid enough.  Our reward is the work we do together.” (from the preface of the annotated reader: Where We Live Now.)

“This video project is dedicated to all those who are part of it, and to one of the creative souls that inspired our way of working together.” – Greg Palmer.

“We are hoping to receive the money we need for the fruition of the project,  but money is not the reason we are undertaking this.  It is a labor of love for each other, for our place, and for planting the seeds in our time that help people live well together where they live now.”

As Lisa Robertson says in the frontispiece of Where We Live Now:

“Perhaps here we shall be other than the administrators of poverty.”

Total cost: $12,000.

Contributed value: $30,500.00

This video project is an educational program of Sunyata Association, a 501-c-3 organization:

Mark R. Jones, President
PO Box 58788
Renton WA. 98058
www.sunyatagroup.ws

This Saturday, June 27th, at 2:30pm a PBS Frontline documentary called “Sick Around the World” will be shown at the new Burien Library’s multipurpose room on the first floor.

A discussion on health care in the US will follow.

There is no charge, and the screening is open to the public.

Here’s a trailer of the video:

Here’s some info on the film from the PBS website:

Four in five Americans say the healthcare system needs fundamental change. Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a healthcare system, or are these nations so culturally different that their solutions would not be acceptable? FRONTLINE correspondent T.R. Reid examines the healthcare systems of other advanced capitalist democracies to see what ideas might help the U.S. reform its broken healthcare system.

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

“I Am Highline,” a new film/DVD, has received a 4Culture Special Project grant to fund the development, filming and production of a promotional film about the Highline area.

The new high-definition film will be Directed by B-Town Blog Publisher Scott Schaefer, a three-time National Emmy Award winner for work on “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” an acclaimed kids’ educational show that aired on PBS. His other credits include “Penn & Teller: BS!,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “Almost Live!” and many others over a 23+ year career in media ranging from Seattle’s KING-TV to six years in Hollywood and much more.

Filming will be begin in the late summer and early fall and will feature diverse residents of Highline.

Schaefer will work with longtime collaborator, Director of Photography Mike Boydstun, a Grammy-nominated cinematographer on this Highline Historical Society project which will celebrate the ethnic composition of Highline. The film will focus on people representing 30 cultures that have moved here to live, work and raise their families, and will feature conversations in English and their own languages, talking about reasons for coming, and what living here means to them.

One early and important use of the footage will be to document these individuals and their contributions for the society’s collections. The DVD produced will be used for informational and fundraising purposes at area festivals and events. Another use will be to include pieces of these interviews that celebrate our local ethnic groups and their contribution to the region in the permanent exhibits of the new Highline Heritage Museum. And finally, parts of this film footage will be placed on the society’s website for everyone to see, and will provide the basis for expanding these stories into a documentary film that can be shown in the new museum theater as an introduction to Highline.

“The historical significance of this film is to continue documenting the heritage of the people of Highline,” said Cyndi Upthegrove, Executive Director of the  Highline Historical Society. “We believe that we are among the first in Highline to provide this broad documentation, and we want to provide a baseline of information for the community to use for many purposes and for an extended period of time.”

The Highline Historical Society is a local non-profit organization undertaking a capital campaign to fund development of the Highline Heritage Museum on its site in Olde Burien. Community participation is welcomed and memberships are available.

For more information, check the Society’s web site at www.highlinehistory.org.

Here’s an outstanding, well-shot and edited short documentary video produced by Erika Schultz of The Seattle Times showing students at Burien’s Sylvester Middle School watching Tuesday’s inauguration of President Obama:

The Highline Historical Society will hold its annual meeting on Sunday, Nov. 23rd at 2pm at the SeaTac City Hall, which is located at 4800 South 188th Street (see map below).

This meeting will also feature an encore showing of the Ken Slusher Documentary “The Seike Garden: An American Story.” This 27-minute film tells the story of the Seike family and their beautiful Seike Japanese Gardens that were moved by the cities of Burien and SeaTac to make way for the 3rd runway at SeaTac International Airport.

It chronicles the history of the garden, cooperative efforts by local governments, nonprofits, and citizens to save the garden, and the physical challenge of relocating and replicating a 45 year-old living work of art. It also highlights the seminal roles that immigrant families have played in building the Highline community, a story that has been repeated in thousands of communities across America.

The film tells the (literally) moving story of the community effort to save this living gem. Using personal interviews and images drawn from family photos, Super-8 footage of original garden construction, and more recent still and motion photography, the film details the fascinating array of social, financial, and logistical hurdles involved in such projects.

A question and answer session with the filmmaker and one of the project managers involved with relocating the garden will follow the premiere.

Admission and parking are free.

View Larger Map

by Janet Grella

Burien resident Carolyn Rosenfield stopped by our B-Town Blog booth at the Farmers’ Market last week to tell us about a documentary film about her great-great grandfather, Samuel Ullman.

Documentary filmmaker Judith Schaefer details his life, as well as the impact of a poem he wrote, on the re-building of Japan after World War II in a one-hour film entitled “So Long Are You Young.”

As a child, Samuel Ullman settled in the southern United States before the Civil War with his family, comprised of German-born Jewish immigrants. After a life spent in a variety of fields, including as a soldier in the Civil War, merchant, rabbi, philosopher and community activist, Mr. Ullman turned to writing poetry in his final years.

“Youth” was written in 1917 when he was 77.

“Youth” came into the possession of General Douglas MacArthur, whose framed display of it deeply impressed Japanese visitors to his Tokyo office at the close of WWII. Subsequently spread across the then-broken nation, the poem inspired a generation of Japanese desperate for hope. Today, prominent Japanese businessmen still cite its influence.

Well-known in Japan, this little known American poem has been quoted by Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and both the American (1945), and Japanese (1946) Readers Digests. It was a favorite of Sen. Robert Kennedy, and was quoted by Sen. Ted Kennedy at the eulogy of his slain brother.

This compelling documentary was premiered at the Vancouver Film Festival in 2007. Carolyn is hoping to show it at Seattle’s’ Jewish Film Festival. If you have a group that would like to see this film, please contact us by email here.

Here’s the poem, “Youth” by Samuel Ullman:

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease.  This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty.  Nobody grows old merely by a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.  Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living.  In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

And here’s an MP3 of a reading of it:
[display_podcast]

The Sustainability movement for cities like B-Town is really starting to catch on, and if you’re at all curious about what it means to your life or living spaces, you should check out this upcoming movie showing called “Designing A Great Neighborhood” which plays Wed. Aug. 20th at 7pm at St. Francis Church (map below).

From the film’s press release:

Ever wonder what a sustainable and affordable community might look like?

Ever wonder if a “zero emissions” neighborhood where solar energy, energy efficiency, and changes in behavior eliminate the need for fossil fuels is possible?

Let us look at one community and how they did it, based on principles of sustainability.

After watching DESIGNING A GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD (54mins), we’ll talk about these principles, how they can be incorporated into our everyday lives and in plans for our future. Imagine!

To people driving past the old Holiday Drive-In Theater site in Boulder, Colorado, it might seem like a new neighborhood has sprung out of the ground overnight. But those who worked on the project’s development know better. Collectively, hundreds of thousands of decisions and choices were made to create the 330-home neighborhood, where affordability and sustainability are primary goals. It wasn’t exactly a simple mission.

In DESIGNING A GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD, director David Wann follows the progress of the Wild Sage Cohousing Community project, where future residents participate in the design of their own neighborhood. The stated architectural goal at the Wild Sage site in Boulder is a “zero emissions” neighborhood in which solar energy, energy efficiency, and changes in behavior eliminate the need for fossil fuels.

The master site developer, The Boulder Housing Partners (BHP), has a vision for creating affordable neighborhoods that are also lively, efficient and pedestrian friendly. More than 400 people with low and middle incomes will live at Holiday, many as first-time homeowners.

Awards:

• Black Bear Film Festival
• Princeton Environmental Film Festival
• Brownfields Conference Film Festival

Reviews:

“Finally, a film that goes beyond green building to address the comprehensive benefits of green neighborhood design! By prioritizing quality over size, we can achieve better neighborhoods for people in all stages of life and income brackets. The market for great neighborhoods will flourish once people know what’s possible, and can ‘vote with their dollars.’ Developers, governing officials and the public need to see this film!” – Alexis Karolides, AIA, Principal, Green Development Services, Rocky Mountain Institute

“‘People don’t really understand there are choices about how you build and where you live,’ says Wann. ‘This story enables them to see an example of something different to make them happier, save them money and save the environment. It’s a lay person’s look at what green building means.’…Higher density, a community garden, walkable and interconnected streets, nearby shops and even shared car rentals encourage a sociable existence.” The Denver Post

Co-sponsored by St Francis Just Faith, Southend Neighbors for Peace and Justice, and Sustainable Burien.

• St. Francis Church, Unity Place
  15226 21st Ave SW
• Wed, Aug 20th at 7pm

A study guide (in PDF form) is available here, and a video guide is available here.

Tonight at 7pm, come to Cafe Rozella’s Friday FREE Film Night and see Spike Lee’s great documentary on Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans and its people, “When The Levees Broke.”

Did we mention that it’s FREE? As in…NO COVER?

From the HBO website:

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005.

Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort.

Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world.

The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS.

The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina’s catastrophic passage through New Orleans.

Sneak peak of Part One of the film:

Spike Lee introduces the film in New Orleans in 2006:

White Center’s Cafe Rozella is hosting another Free Friday Night Movie this Friday at 7pm.

This week’s flick is Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a 2005 documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history.

The film examines the collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company’s top executives; it also shows the involvement of the Enron traders in the California electricity crisis.

Interviews are conducted with former executives, stock analysts, reporters and the former Governor of California Gray Davis.

The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 78th Academy Awards.

As an analysis of corruption in corporations the film gives a realistic look at corporate culture and the inherent problems within. The movie presents two mechanisms for motivating a vastly immoral and profit-driven corporate culture; namely the vitality curve and the Milgram experiment.

The vitality curve is an idea of constant competition in the work place. Individuals are driven to out-perform each other wherever possible because the employees doing worst in a particular field will be fired. Enron constantly hired new staff because even with record profits it was firing people for making less than 1000 times what they were being paid. The atmosphere of the work place caused people to not only disregard the law, but also to act competitively in breaking the law.

The film features actual voice clips from Enron employees discussing the transfer of electricity from the state of California into nodes in other states where there was a surplus. California had signed legislation allowing for a free market in energy. As a response to this, Enron created a demand by causing blackouts across the state. Following this the price of electricity sky-rocketed, right in time for Enron to ship back the energy they took out of California back into California, making billions upon billons of dollars in profits. The controllers who were doing this discussed how much energy they had transferred knowing full well that it was going to blackout the cities in California.

The Milgram experiment was conducted to see how long an individual can take an order before they question that order. The test was set up so that a person is told that an individual will be shocked with electricity every time they push a button. The person is told to raise the voltage and push the button over and over until the person pushing the button decides to stop on moral grounds. On average a person would die three times over with the number of times the button was pushed.

With a goal derived from the pursuit of profit, Enron employees were constantly told to break laws or perform acts that could be considered immoral. Few Enron employees ever came forward to report the corruption. The factor that inevitably led to people coming forward was a “sinking ship” feeling, resulting in some of the Enron executives selling their shares while telling employees to keep their shares.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

Cafe Rozella is located at 9434 Delridge Way SW in White Center:

View Larger Map

Interesting and educational 6-1/2-minute Youth Media Institute documentary from 2006 about B-Town’s potential annexation area, the diverse community of White Center (you know, that neighborhood to the north with the great hardware store? The one you drive through quickly to get to West Seattle…?):

Courtesy Ricardo Guarnero of White Center’s Cafe Rozella:

Cafe Rozella Presents the Celebrated Documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car” for FREE this Friday night (2/15) at 7pm!

BYO popcorn or munch on Rozella’s tasty tamales, quesadillas, and sweets.

MOVIE INFO:
It begins with a solemn funeral…for a car. By the end of Chris Paine’s lively and informative documentary, the idea doesn’t seem quite so strange. As narrator Martin Sheen notes, “They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline.” Paine proceeds to show how this unique vehicle came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person’s terms (director Alex Gibney, Oscar-nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, served as consulting producer).

And everyone gets the chance to have their say: engineers, politicians, protesters, and petroleum spokespeople–even celebrity drivers, like Peter Horton, Alexandra Paul, and a wild man beard-sporting Mel Gibson. But the most persuasive participant is former Saturn employee Chelsea Sexton. Promoting the benefits of the EV1 was more than a job to her, and she continues to lobby for more environmentally friendly options. Sexton provides the small ray of hope Paine’s film so desperately needs. Who Killed the Electric Car? is, otherwise, a tremendously sobering experience. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

TRAILER:

Brought to you by the White Center Arts Alliance.

And Mark your Calendar for Richard Hugo Night – February 28th at 7 p.m.

WHEN: Friday, Feb. 15th at 7pm

WHERE: Cafe Rozella, 9434 Delridge Way SW, Seattle, WA 98106 • (206) 763-5805

View Larger Map