GOVERNMENT! The Agencies We Think We Know is a series of ten feature documentaries, each one focusing on a U.S. government agency. We will tell the dramatic and unexpected stories of why these agencies were founded in the first place, how they evolved, and how they function today.
SYNOPSIS
Each story will have two main threads: the history of the agencies themselves will be interwoven with the poignant stories of an individual or team within each agency working on a specific problem to be solved: It is 1887, and Jefferson Milton is on patrol. He rides the trail from Nogales hundreds of miles west to the Colorado River, and then he rides back again. It is just Jeff, his horse, and his deadly accurate aim, protecting the people of Arizona from “alien invasion.” He is one of America’s first Customs Mounted Inspectors, essentially the first Border Patrol Agent, and his story is the stuff of legend. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle describes meat packing workers throwing poisoned rat corpses into sausage meant for human consumption. The public reacts with shock and revulsion. It takes only months for the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which establishes the FDA to enforce stricter food safety standards. These are the accounts of the civil servants who handle calamitous situations as part of their job. These are the stories of the agencies they create to avoid disaster moving forward. The hundreds of agencies that make up our government show a country striving to improve and even save the lives of its citizens. These agencies are as varied as the problems facing the nation, and many of them find their budgets and staff on the chopping block.
Director Statement
Our government is under attack. Agencies are being slashed and dismantled. Civil servants are being demonized. Institutional memory is hemorrhaging from every part of this American experiment. At the same time, civic education is at an all-time low. The corporate world moves faster than most agencies can keep up with. And Americans have been trained to see their government as the enemy. Telling the stories of these agencies is not only urgent, it is crucial for the health of our democracy. As with previous documentaries, we will develop lesson plans for middle- and high schools, course materials for the college level, and community discussion guides. These films will have a long life, being used as a definitive resource on how our government works - and, possibly, on how to rebuild, what lessons were learned in the past. As filmmakers, we have now been involved in two feature documentary projects that captured the history of government agencies: The Greatest Good - about the history of the U.S. Forest Service, and A Towering Task - about the history of the Peace Corps. Each agency has a unique story, but the experience of having told these kinds of stories before sets us up for success: We have the connections built to the many archives across the country, we have the credibility of handling these stories in a fair and thoughtful, and also entertaining manner, and we have the understanding to tell complex stories that cover decades of history and numerous characters.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director/Producer Alana DeJoseph
Alana DeJoseph was associate producer of the PBS documentaries The Greatest Good (about the U.S. Forest Service) and Green Fire (about conservationist Aldo Leopold). Her second feature
documentary about a US government agency came in the form of A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps. On September 22nd, 2019, the film premiered to a full house at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In 2020, she won the Best Director award in the feature documentary category at the Indo Global International Film Festival in Mumbai, and in 2024, she won an Emmy for A
Towering Task. The film has screened at 11 film festivals and won numerous awards, and continues to be broadcast on public television stations, bringing the discussion about global citizenship to communities across the country and the globe.
Producer Shana Kelly
Award-winning writer/producer
Shana began her career as a literary agent at the William Morris Agency in New York and London for ten years. She currently works as a documentary screenwriter, book editor, and teacher at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. In 2024, she won an Emmy for writing A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps, a historical documentary which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in 2019 and aired on PBS in September 2023. Recently, she wrote the documentary Just the Beginning: A Century of Political Power and the League of Women Voters.
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ABOUT YOUR DONATION
Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
Your contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law, and a confirmation of your donation will be sent via email. WMM will send you an acknowledgement letter in the mail to the address listed for tax purposes.
