Filmed over eight years, GRAINS OF SAND accompanies the filmmaker’s mother and mother-in-law, artists and close friends, as they enter their ninth decade. Through conversation, memories and artwork, they explore together the lifelong project of becoming oneself.
GRAINS OF SAND offers a counter-narrative to the marginalization and invisibility of older people in our society, particularly women, by affirming the importance and relevance of their work and life experiences. The film unpacks formative moments in their biographies, reflects on how they grappled with traditional societal expectations of women, and creates space for issues of aging usually ignored by society – such as fear of death, illness, and body pain.
GRAINS OF SAND is a testament to the power of art and friendship and a personal exploration of what it means to age and continue becoming oneself. In the true sense of the phrase, it is a story of two women’s coming-of-age at 80.
STATUS OF PRODUCTION
GRAINS OF SAND is currently in rough cut. The length will be 87 minutes. We aim for a festival release in the fall of 2024.
The Corona virus is not over. Nor are the divisions between us. Race and economic situations separate us far more than any ocean. CONNECTION is a personal, 4 part documentary which builds a political and historical chronicle of our time through personal stories of daily life from around the world.
The film participants — fifteen people on four continents — live very different lives. They are rich and unemployed, black and white, over eighty and not yet in school. They live in New York, California, Turkey, Germany and South Africa. Personal zoom conversations reveal the experiences we share — and the hard facts which divide us. Our open and even humorous talks reflect the impact of the historical events on all of us.
As we are catapulted from one global problem to the next without any solutions, our conversations give us hope. A film about the power of connection.
BOURJ STORIES PROJECT is a collaborative, ongoing film workshop and documentary, conceived and produced in collaboration between the Alsama Project in Beirut, Lebanon and Bugle Films.
A hybrid project that portrays Syrian refugee students in an observational documentary and at the same time integrates their stories and reflections on daily life through short films which they make. The filmmakers accompany the students – young teenagers who left wartorn Syria with their families and now live in a refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon – over a period of years. We see the students engaged in film development workshops where they learn to use camera and sound. We observe them in their school lives, in the camp and at home.
Co-directed with Nour Alkheder. Produced by Bugle Films and Alsama.
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?
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.
The Woman Behind It
Sarah Gross is a politically engaged filmmaker, writer, and mother of three young adults. She studied filmmaking at Harvard University. Her documentaries have been broadcast internationally, and were shown in festivals around the globe.
Gross grew up in a multi-racial family in the U.S.; family and racial identity are common themes of her works. Her short films have won awards, and she has received MEDIA funding to develop her screenwriting. Sarah Gross has dual nationality in the U.S. and Germany.
As head of Bugle Films she is fulfilling her mission of making the world a more empathetic place, one film at a time.
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