Bugle Films – Stories from outside the box

Bugle Films Presents: Connection

A chronicle of life during the Corona pandemic told in collaboration with close friends and family spread across four continents. Stories of humor and crisis are interwoven with our filmed views onto our very different worlds, revealing how our differences impacted our lives.

The film’s protagonists live in completely separate worlds. Close friends and family of mine, they are both rich and unemployed, black and white, over eighty and not yet in school. They live in New York, California, Turkey, Germany and South Africa. All of us find ourselves in an extreme situation: locked in and afraid during the first months of Covid. They film their daily lives — their footage gives us insight into their personal experiences.

From March 2020 to February 2021 we zoom regularly and I film these conversations. Our open and even humorous talks reflect the impact of the events of 2020 on all of us. These are people who lose their job due to the downturn, find themselves in a social explosion after the murder of George Floyd, or lose sleep during the U.S. elections. This collaboratively produced film allows us to see this year through very different perspectives.

In the challenging months of 2020, as we were catapulted from one global problem to the next without any solutions, our conversations gave us hope. A film about the power of connection.

Bugle Films Presents: A Growing Thing

25 years after the end of apartheid, a black South African mother is training to become a leader in her township community. A glimpse of post-apartheid life from a woman’s perspective.

With only a 5th grade education, Jabulile Ndaba, a tall black woman with a contagious sense of humor, never thought of herself as a manager. Now she is a leader-in-training at a women’s project near Johannesburg. The project, Kopanang, enables women to earn money through embroidery – and enables Jabulile to learn management skills.

Jabulile is the sole provider for her large family. Her husband drinks away his earnings at the local bar. When Jabulile discovers that their teenage son has started smoking the highly addictive street drug “nyaope,” she determines to do whatever it takes to help him quit.

Kopanang is run by an Irish nun who is training the women to run the project by themselves. When she announces that she will be moving to Australia, Jabulile and her fellow leaders are expected to take over the management of Kopanang: Can they rise to the challenge?

WATCH THE FILM HERE

Bugle Films Presents: Brown Bread

Brown Bread is a film about family, about ethnic identity, and how we define ourselves regardless of geographical locations or last name.

In the hills of Northern California, an unusual family gathers for their reunion. As they join hands around the table, their colorful mix of races looks like the American dream of integration. It started with a vision. The grandparents recall how in the 1970s they began to adopt. Scenes from the week-long reunion are intercut with images from their adult children”s daily lives. A professor at Stanford, a manual day laborer, an entrepreneur in debt, …these portraits show radical differences in class and identity. Their ability to laugh and to love across boundaries of social and racial division made this family possible. But their differences still drive them apart. A personal documentary about what it means to grow up in an adoptive family.

WATCH THE FILM HERE

Bugle Films – Stories From Outside the Box

Our mission is to make the world more empathetic- one story at a time.
Through focusing on wide scale issues on a personal level,
we make meaningful stories from individual lives.

The Woman Behind It

Sarah Gross is a passionate filmmaker who believes in the power of storytelling. Growing up in a large, multi-racially adopted family, she learned to see a culture from all its sides, and has a passion for communicating across our differences. She has a gift for, through her films, seducing the viewer to connect with the stories she tells.

After getting an undergraduate degree at Harvard, she came to Berlin on a Fulbright to study silent film then went on to work as 1st Assistant Director for international films including Goodbye Lenin. For the past ten years she has been writing and directing her own short fiction films, and feature-length documentaries.

As head of Bugle Films she is fulfilling her mission of making the world a more empathetic place, one film at a time.