Medicine Box Project Update (December 2007):
This month marks the two-year anniversary of the beginning of production. I've now lost count of the tapes -- likely close to 130 tapes which means approximately 130 hours of raw footage. Being based in New York City now, and having most of the action taking place back in St. Paul, it's been a matter of a few frantic flights back to the Twin Cities. And I've also been fortunate to be able to rely on our Executive Producer Melody Gilbert for advice and on Mike Forstein and Norah Shapiro for "second unit" production when I've been unable to make it back for critical moments.
Back in 2005, when the project was first pitched to me, among the people with whom I first met was an author named Billy Young. Billy was just starting a book that was to run parallel to our film production. Well, I'm clearly a little slower than Billy because that book has now been released. The book is called My Heart it is Delicious: the Story of the Center for International Health. You can buy the book – you'll be enriched and you'll have a great platform from which to dive into the feature film, when it is completed.
Regarding the film, we've created something we're calling an "illustrative sequence" – a more informal version of a trailer – for fundraising purposes and they are available for viewing above. It is just a small sample of the kind of footage we've been able to compile. Our first 25 hours culled down to 10 minutes. The video sample's purpose is not to present the narrative arc of our film, nor to cover all the ground that we hope to cover in the final film, but to simply give the flavor of the project.
We have also finished the first self-contained film to come out of the Medicine Box project, "If We Knew Their Stories," a twenty-minute look at refugees and the harrowing things they have gone through, told in their own words and relayed to us by their doctors. The film is making it's broadcast debut this month in the Twin Cities on TPT (December 16 10pm on channel 2, and December 22 10pm on channel 17). The film is also available to view online.
- Producer-Director Chris Newberry
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please contact Chris Newberry.
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