: M i s s i o n :
: S t a f f :
: B o a r d of D i r e c t o r s :
: H i s t o r y:
Our artistic mission is to engage in production and distribution of video documentaries about street survivors, runaways living in squats, and the homeless population of Berkeley and Oakland, as well as "outsider" art consisting of music and writing produced by people on the fringe. Added to this we regularly document musical and artistic events in the Bay Area, such as the Free Folk Festival, the Berkeley Arts Festival, concerts and special events at People's Park, and demonstrations of all kinds including those focused on social change and reform.
We are a small group of filmmakers, artists and musicians who function mostly on a volunteer basis. We offer free social service referral as well as artistic training to runaways, parolees, addicts, and people discharged from psychiatric units and on the street. These heavily scarred young people, often early graduates of Juvenile Hall in San Francisco, are mostly running from abusive situations and living in squats. We hope to bring these documentaries to the attention of law making organizations as well as a national audience, and have begun to be successful in this goal since our work is broadcast regularly over Channel 25 and occasionally to a larger audience such as through the Free Speech Channel with its network of over two hundred cable stations.
ART AND EDUCATION MEDIA was incorporated in March of 1989. Since then we have shot approximately thirteen hundred hours of current sociological history in the Bay Area. Much of this footage has been of people on the edge , and a tragic note to some of our projects has been the number of memorials of peacetime casualties we have filmed, including activists Bob Sparks, Jonathan Montague, David Nadel, and assorted homeless individuals such as Yume, Blue, etc. A heavy project this year, involving hundreds of hours, has been cataloging and database entry of our extensive archive.
We predict that this careful record will be of increasing interest to organizations like the Berkeley Historical Society and the Phoebe Hearst Anthropology Museum as well as archive houses for many years to come.
Accomplishments include our contribution of footage to the theatrical film TIM LEARY'S DEAD which received excellent reviews in The New York Times etc, broadcast of several of our pieces on the Free Speech Cable Network, and, most encouraging, acceptance of a substantial group of our documentaries by distributors.
We feel our biggest achievement is not measurable in monetary terms. This consists of our close creative connection with a group of people living on the street and in SRO hotels for a few days when their SSI checks come in.
We have free screenings of work in progress. We send out flyers and notify the local paper. During the screenings we pass out suggestion and criticism forms and invite questions and comments from the audience.
Channel 25 lists our weekly programs on their calendar and newsletters and play our videos three times a week, one in the evening, the following morning at ten AM and the following day at 2:00PM.
We also have an ongoing relationship with assorted social service homeless advocacy groups as well as the volunteer free food organizations.
We video many local music festivals and theater events, among them a theater group of amputees and also creative work by former prisoners at Santa Rita jail.We run a free writing workshop for homeless people. We make a point of documenting local riots, demonstrations, street music and poetry , plus life stories and events in People's Park. On the anniversaries as well as park memorials, Claire Burch brings her camera for a record of those events, often in connection with her twenty year archiving of individual life stories. She continues to also document readings by assorted groups and individuals in the Bay Area, such as the seventeen year running record of a local quadriplegic poet.