You name ‘em, we’ve got them: Michigan photographers, amateur actresses, adventure authors ... the works.
What unites them? They all seek a change.
First up, two moms who found each other in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Sara Joy was about to lose her infant son. Monni Must was volunteering her talents as a family photographer, coming in to take a final family portrait for Sara and her son. What they didn’t know is how those photos would help them both heal.
From film festivals to folk-rock, this week's ArtPod has it all.
It’s baaaaaack. After a brief hiatus (we missed you, too!) ArtPod is bigger and better than ever, bringing you all the Michigan artists and thinkers we’re following now.
This week, we’re hashing out the best of the Arab American film festival in Dearborn. Every festival has its inside-baseball politics about which films get in and which don’t. But Sundance just might be a cakewalk compared with trying to tackle the Arab spring and the Syrian conflict in just one week of screenings.
We hear from the guy who’s got that job, and we get the rundown on his favorite picks of the year.
We’re also heading to a Detroit shelter for LGBT teens. Michigan Radio’s Kyle Norris tells us how these young men (and a handful of women) are making their own kind of families, with a little help from Madonna: it’s called vogue dancing, and for gay youth in Detroit, it’s brave stuff. You’ve gotta hear this story, and then you need to check out this video:
Then, we cut the baby boomers some slack for a change: sure, they’re notoriously self-obsessed and nostalgic for those groovy gone-by years of their youth. But guess what? So are Millenials! (Hint: young adults born after 1981.)
On today's Artpod, we hear from the festival's director, Donald Harrison. We also catch up with two longtime fans of the festival - one: an audience member, the other: a filmmaker - to hear some of their favorite film fest memories.
Festival-goer: "Every year I find at least two or three films that are just amazing."
John Johnson has been going to the Ann Arbor Film Festival since the late 1960s, and considers himself a big fan of the event.
He's such a big fan that when a film he likes doesn't win an award at the festival, he sends the filmmaker a "a few dollars myself and tell them what a great film it was." He says he's probably done that about four times, three of which have resulted in a letter back from the filmmaker and a DVD copy of the film.
One of his favorite memories was when he saw Claude LeLouch's "Rendezvous" at the 1976 film festival. He says the film "totally blew my mind," left him with goose bumps.
Johnson says every year he finds "at least two or three films that are just amazing, from my point of view." He says it's worth sitting in the theatre for hours to get to the films "that are just amazing that you would have nowhere else to see."
Detroit, Flint, Dearborn and other cities have recently had to close some of their library branches in order to save money, which means access to free computers and computer training is becoming more limited.
On today's Artpod, we'll visit a group that's working to close the digital divide.
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