2022 Festival
September 29 - October 2, 2022
Shows
Of Medicine and Miracles
This powerful documentary follows two intersecting stories, both connected to curing cancer, one following two parents trying to keep their daughter alive, the other following a dedicated team of doctors trying to do the same.
The Janes
A daring and covert collective of women in the Chicago area were helping women in the late 1960’s and early ‘70s get safe but illegal abortions. They called themselves The Janes and fortunately, their services were never needed again after the Roe decision in 1973. Until now.
The Journey Up
We all get our heart broken in some way or another at some point in our lives whether it’s soured romances, work setbacks or even the degradation of the planet. Knowing that, what is the best way to process this pain? The answer may be right outside your door.
The Power of Awe
So many of us accept our lives as they are, moving diligently forward with time. Others are determined to forge their own future and disrupt broken systems. That is certainly the case with the people featured in this show.
World As Family
Human rights abuses are increasingly prevalent but so is compassion fatigue. How do we find the right balance of understanding and impact when it feels so overwhelming?
The Big Idea
After an inspiring weekend of stories and ideas, this show presents one last effort to weave it all together so that we can head back into our lives with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
Guests
Bob Baer
Bob Baer is a retired CIA agent who has written several books on his time at the Agency and has been a frequent commentator on CNN and elsewhere.
Brigid Kaelin
Brigid Kaelin is an award-winning Americana, multi-instrumental musician and storyteller, who uses her music to chronicle motherhood and feminism. She plays accordion, piano, musical saw, guitar, ukulele and various other things with strings. She has been a friend of OT since our first year in 2018, and has been part of every festival since.
Emma Pildes
Emma Pildes has a personal connection to the Janes as both her father and brothers figure into the plot of the film. She is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, making her directorial debut with The Janes. She has an extensive background and boundless love for non-fiction storytelling, which shines through in this powerful documentary.
Gabrielle Louise
Gabrielle Louise is a songwriter and storytelling living in the mountains of Colorado. Half her time she's touring and making records, and the other half she's gardening, watercolor painting, and writing songs on her porch. Her live show is honest, introspective and engaging. Gabrielle’s sound is anchored deeply in folk and Americana, but undeniably drawn to rich harmonies and melodic adventurism.
The Janes
The Janes - These women were young and bold fifty years ago when they were hard at work providing safe abortions for women in the Chicago area. Now, they are less young but just as bold as they offer lessons from their own lives for the next generation of activists who will work to save lives in an unjust society.
Kate Woodsome
Kate Woodsome is a producer, writer and director at The Washington Post whose journalism explores the motives and impacts of abuses of power, inequity and social division. She is the co-director of the Post Opinions short film Bring Them Home and was part of the team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Leah Podzimek
Leah Podzimek is a freelance arts administrator, creative producer, and performer based in Denver, CO. She is also a trained operatic soprano, and will be performing with “Interplay”, an idea born out of conversation and a passion to bring the performance arts and fine arts together in connected and meaningful expression.
Rabbi Irwin Kula
Rabbi Irwin Kula is a seventh-generation rabbi who accurately self-identifies as a “disruptive spiritual innovator.” He currently serves as president The National Center for Learning and Leadership, a think-tank committed to making Jewish a Public Good. His ongoing work with spiritual leaders, businesses and organizations around the world inspires people to live with greater passion, purpose, creativity and compassion.
Ray Whitehouse
Ray Whitehouse is a filmmaker who has extensive experience sharing stories at the point where journalism meets documentary film. He was part of the Washington Post team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting about the Capitol insurrection and its aftermath. This year he comes to OT as co-director of the film Bring Them Home, which follows the family of Emad Sharghi, one of a growing number of Americans being held hostage by foreign governments.
Ross Kauffman
Ross Kauffman is the Academy Award®-winning filmmaker of the feature documentary BORN INTO BROTHELS. The film was shown in over sixty film festivals worldwide and received a multitude of awards, including the 2005 Emmy Award for Best Documentary, National Board of Review Best Documentary 2004, LA Film Critics Best Documentary 2004, and the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. His latest feature documentary, OF MEDICINE AND MIRACLES, premiered at that Tribeca Film Festival in 2022.
Sheila Smith Avruch
While at the University of Chicago, Sheila Smith Avruch helped women get illegal abortions as part of the Janes, a clandestine feminist group. She subsequently worked in the health care system and then as an analyst and Assistant Director at the Government Accountability Organization, a congressional agency. Her work on children’s health issues helped spur Congress to start the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Tuany Nascimento
As documented in the short film Na Ponta dos Pés, Tuany Nascimento started a dance company for you girls at age 23 in the heart of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous favelas. She continues to work to give these young women a creative outlet, so that they might have a better future as well as a safe space from the violent world that surrounds them.
Leslie t. Chang
Leslie T. Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, specializing in stories that explored how socioeconomic change is transforming institutions and individuals. She has also written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Condé Nast Traveler. In 2008, she published her first book Factory Girls following the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. She will join us in conversation for World As Family.
Laura Waters Hinson
Laura Waters Hinson is an award-winning filmmaker who serves as the director of the Community Voice Lab in Washington, DC. Her films focus on personal journeys, exploring themes of reconciliation, human resilience and entrepreneurship. She joins us as director of the short film Street Reporter, in which she steps outside into her own town to capture the power and purpose that community newspapers can offer to those experiencing homelessness.
James Balog
For almost 40 years, photographer James Balog has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of nature. An avid mountaineer with a graduate degree in geography and geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps.
Hannah Sharghi
Hannah Sharghi lives in Washington, DC and is working relentlessly to bring her father home from Iran where he is being held captive by the regime. Her family’s story is depicted in the film, Bring Them Home.
Florence Williams
An avid researcher, Florence Williams is wonderfully curious about the world around her. Her renowned book, The Nature Fix looked at the healing power of nature and now she has taken all her skills to focus on grief. Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey tells her own story about how her husband left her unexpectedly. She decided to process her pain by diving into how heartbreak and grief actually manifest in our lives and bodies. The physicality of loss is real, but there are also ways to heal ourselves through finding awe in this world.
Dr. Carl June
Dr. Carl June is a renowned immunologist and oncologist, currently serving as a Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. After losing his first wife to cancer, he has dedicated his career to finding a cure to this scourge, spearheading innovative research and discovering breakthrough treatment via cellular immunotherapies. He is a featured subject in the film, Of Medicine and Miracles.
Brit Barron
Brit Barron is a pastor and author of the book Worth It: Overcome Your Fears and Embrace the Life You Were Meant For, which is about her journey from being raised in a conservative church setting, becoming a pastor of a mega–church at age 26 and then leaving it all to find her truth when she came out, married her wife and built a new life.
Raye Zaragoza
This is technically Raye Zaragoza’s second time at OT, following a virtual festival performance in 2020. She will returns to the festival with a live performance and conversation about her work and what it means to make music as a Japanese-American, Mexican, Indigenous woman living in America. Her latest album Woman in Color explores how complicated this can be. “There is a part of [my family] that wants to be proud of who we are, but there’s a part that’s been pressured to fit in and assimilate.”
Sheila White
Sheila White works for the Street Sense newspaper that chronicles what life is like on the streets and has her own compelling journey of working to change her life situation.
Tia Lessin
Tia Lessin is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker who finds important stories in America that have historically gone untold. She joins us this year as co-director of The Janes, sharing an ever-pertinent lens around women’s resistance in the name of physical autonomy.
Tom Voss
After seeing extensive combat during the Iraq War from 2003-2006, Tom Voss struggled to navigate life back home and was diagnosed with PTSD. Frustrated by the inadequate treatment offered by the VA, he embarked in 2013 on a 2700 mile walk from Milwaukee to Los Angeles in pursuit of his own healing (as seen in the documentary, Almost Sunrise). He is now the founder of the cooperative nonprofit Ojai Earth, focusing on regenerating people and the planet through holistic practices, particularly the power of mindfulness. His compassionate and educated lens offers some real solace to those who have experienced trauma in their military service and extends that to all people who participate in his practice.
Films
Bring Them Home
Americans Emad and Bahareh Shargi never expected their family to be torn apart while visiting Iran, their country of birth. But when Iranian officials hold Emad hostage on bogus espionage charges, Bahareh and her daughters are forced into unlikely roles. They must navigate Iran’s authoritarian system and U.S. politics to try to free Emad from being a pawn in nuclear negotiations.
Street Reporter
Sheila White, 58, dreams of becoming a photojournalist and escaping her life of homelessness. Yearning to make this change, she studies at a local university while completing homework late into the night at the women’s shelter. Street Reporter is a deeply intimate, character-based film produced with community collaborators that provides a window into the power of community journalism in one woman’s life, casting a vision of the re-humanizing effects of life’s most basic need: a place to call home.
Of Medicine and Miracles
This compelling documentary follows two intersecting stories, both connected to curing cancer. The audience finds itself up close with the parents of Emily Whitehouse, desperately seeking a treatment that will save their young daughter’s life. The other story follows Dr. Carl June and his colleagues as we learn about their own tumultuous and painfully personal journey of experimental research his team has relentlessly executed to find a new solution to this old disease. Tied together by Oscar-winning filmmaker Ross Kaufman (Born into Brothels, Tigerland, E-Team and more), this film is an unexpected emotional and scientific journey that will instill a range of emotions; from sadness to empathy to ultimately, hope.
Na Ponta dos Pés (On Pointe)
The inspiring story of Tuany, a 23-year-old ballet dancer who started a dance company for young girls in the middle of one of Rio De Janeiro’s most dangerous favelas. She gives students hope for a better future and a safe space away from the violent world around them.
The Price of Certainty
This short documentary explores the ideas of Dr. Arie Kruglanski, who in 1989 coined the theory of “cognitive closure” to describe how we close off our minds to new information once we subscribe to a belief system.
Belle River
In the spring of 2019 flooding throughout the gulf hit record highs, and residents of Pierre-Part, Louisiana prepared for the worst. Faith and resilience are the two best weapons they show in the face of uncertainty.
The Janes
These women were young and bold fifty years ago when they were hard at work providing safe abortions for women in the Chicago area. Now, they remain just as bold as they offer lessons from their own lives for the next generation of activists who will work to save lives in an unjust society.