SeanChron | New Film, "A Most Beautiful Thing" Documents How Rowing Brought Rivals Together: Gangs in the Past, Police & Community Today

Alumni crew preparing for 2019 Chicago Sprints

September 9, 2020. As a former rower myself, this story really caught my atteniton and inspired me. A new documentary, A Most Beautiful Thing,  shares the story of the Manley High School crew team, the first black high school rowing team in the US and how rowing helped addressed gang violence in Chicago in the early 2000s. The team's reunion and preparation for the 2019 Chicago Sprints included a new element of community healing, police officers. 

Skyler Aikerson reports on the film in the June 2020 issue of Chicago magazine, in his article A crew to remember. 

NBC's Kate Snow shares the story of the unique partnership with the Chicago Police Department in her story, Rowing Together for Change (video below).

Advanced Style | Blog & New Film Celebrate our Stylish Elders

Here at Future-ish, especially with our Stylish Scientist List, we often get labelled as promoting too much consumerism, fashion, etc. What we have always felt is that true style, the essence of style is about expressing yourself and your individuality in all of the personal lifestyle choices you make...in fashion, in food, in travel, etc. We can't think of a better example of exactly this point than the internationally renowned blog Advanced Style that has now made it's way into a full documentary (see video below).

Curated and written by Ari Seth Cohen, the blog and film project highlight some of our most creative and stylish 'Elders' in New York City and around the world, schooling us all on how to live life to the fullest. What is clear form Cohen's sparkling subjects is that expressing oneself and one's individuality only gets better with age.

SeanChron | Suddenly-Sámi in Seattle

Serendipity indeed! Yesterday I discovered that a movie I had wanted to see for some time was playing at the Nordic Heritage Museum near my house in Seattle. The film was Suddenly Sámi, a 2009 award-winning documentary/autobiography by Norwegian filmmaker and writer, Ellen-Astri Lundby, that chronicles her exploration into her indigenous Sámi heritage, a fact that her Mother had hidden from her most of her life. It is a story about ancestry, culture, and traditions but also a story about identity and more importantly, self identity. Many themes in Sámi history are similar to other indigenous cultures around the world, such as historical trauma, but some elements are unique to the Sámi. The prospect of Lundby taking on her Sámi identity and heritage is treated with both sensitivity and humor that makes for a very entertaining story.

Below is the trailer for the movie...

Life in a Day Now Available on YouTube

Life in a Day, YouTube’s experiment in crowd-sourcing a feature-length film, premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, but it is now available on—where else?—YouTube. The film, for those of you who are not familiar with it, describes itself as “a historic film capturing for future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.” It is a 90-minute documentary-style movie pieced together from 4,500 hours of YouTube user-submitted footage from July 24, 2010.

What’s so special about July 24, 2010? It’s a tricky question to answer. The date itself is unremarkable—no holiday, no major historical event, nothing—it was simply chosen out of convenience. But through the experience of viewing the film, it becomes clear that it’s nevertheless incorrect to say that there is nothing special about July 24, 2010. Some of the moments captured in the film are mundane, and some are life-changing, but taken together, these moments create the impression that being alive on July 24, 2010 is all at once beautiful, funny, sad, joyful, and so much more.

Life in a Day is the first film of its kind, and it represents a pivotal moment in both cinema and digital media. As director Kevin Macdonald said in an interview with National Geographic, “The film is doing something that wouldn’t have been possible pre-Internet, specifically pre-YouTube. The idea that you can ask thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all to contribute to a project and all to communicate about it and learn about it at the same time belongs essentially to this age that we live in. Life in a Day couldn’t have existed 100 years ago, 20 years ago, even 6 years ago.” EM