Professors H. James Gilmore and Carolyn Kraus have been invited to screen their new documentary, Men at Work: Voices from Detroit’s Underground Economy, in New York City at the upcoming 2012 Urbanworld Film Festival, the largest internationally competitive multicultural film festival in the world.
This marks the first release from their ongoing oral-history project entitled 1001 Voices From Detroit, which is being organized and produced by the new Journalism and Screen Studies major in the Department of Language, Culture and Communication. The project emerged from the belief of documentary filmmaker Gilmore and former Detroit journalist/columnist Kraus that a different kind of narrative is struggling to emerge from a devastated city. This is the story of how, in an economic climate apparently designed to ensure their failure, people find work, get food and shelter, raise their children—often making up the means to do so as they go along. The first film to come out of the project focuses on Detroit’s men, whose prospects in the conventional economy have been particularly hard hit by recent events, often exacerbated by past incarceration.
Urbanworld® is a five-day event seeking to redefine and advance the roles of multicultural constituents in contemporary filmed entertainment. The festival includes narrative features, documentaries, and short films, as well as panel discussions, live staged screenplay readings, digital and social media.
Men at Work is set to screen at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, September 21 at the AMC 34th Street Theatre in Manhattan.
There will be a screening of the film on campus later in the semester.
For additional information, please contact H. James Gilmore or Carolyn Kraus.