We make award-winning documentaries that bring viewers into different social worlds through intimate, dramatically compelling stories carefully chosen to reveal those worlds. Our directorial decisions are based on an informed understanding of those worlds and our stories gained through authentic trust and understanding built with subjects of all kinds--from homeless people to university trustees, from African healers to industrialists, from fundamentalist Baptists to gay couples. In addition to engaging viewers in powerfully personal and dramatically compelling ways, our documentaries have proven to have long-term educational use. When delivered on DVD's accompanied by host of ancillary materials (in print and video) created in the course of producing them, they provide rich educational tools that can be used in supple, flexible ways with diverse audiences.
We work with colleagues at the top of their respective crafts in documentary filmmaking including cameramen Tom Hurwitz, Brian Dowley, Michael Camerini, and Alan Dater, sound recordists Roger Phoenix and Peter Redding, and editors Kate Purdie and Jean Boucicaut, chosen for their sensitivity and style for the specific project at hand.
We also make use of new technologies in digital video to produce engaging documentaries in more cost-effective, less expensive ways. We have produced documentaries for, among others, the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Association of Theological Schools and the Episcopal Church Foundation.
James Ault is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and scholar educated at Harvard College and Brandeis University. He studied social theory and phenomenology with Egon Bittner and comparative historical sociology with Barrington Moore before earning his Ph.D. in 1981 from Brandeis University's remarkable Department of Sociology. His first area of study was African politics and culture begun at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. His first film, BORN AGAIN: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival and was broadcast as a national prime-time special on PBS, and on Channel 4 in the UK, and around the world. His book on that project, Spirit and Flesh, which tells the story of that film and the congregation it portrays while building a framework for understanding new right conservatism, will be published by Knopf in September, 2004.
Dr. Ault is currently working on a series of documentary films exploring the changing nature of Christianity in Africa as it grows explosively in that part of the world and roots itself more authentically and confidently in local cultures. Another current project is an ongoing series of short documentaries on community institutions in his home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, funded by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Called Northampton's Living History Community Heritage Project, its subjects include Family Court, a hospital emergency room, and a shoe shop. He has produced documentary programs for, among others, the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Episcopal Church Foundation, and recently held the William Spoelhof Chair for a visiting scholar at Calvin College where he taught documentary filmmaking.
Kate Purdie serves as a principal editor for many of our projects, including our series on African Christianity. Trained in MIT's reknowned Film School, Kate worked in New York City with documentary filmmakers David Grubin and Robert Drew and with 60 Minutes, before moving to nearby Marlboro, Vermont, with her husband, producer and cameraman Andy Reichsman, to raise theirchildren.