BlueSpark Collaborative projects in development
Our goal is to ‘spark’ collaborations with filmmakers, researchers, intellectuals and activists that create change. Coming soon from BlueSpark Collaborative.
South to Black Power: A Black Power Manifesto
What would it take to bring true political power to Black America?
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, the film follows the author on a journey to present his book’s thesis face-to-face with Black voters. His proposal—that African Americans should leave northern destination cities of the Great Migration, and return to the South in voting numbers large enough to take control of southern legislatures. Charles’s travels reveal whether African Americans reject his proposal for Black Power, or whether they can embrace it as a road map to the future.
Bound By Blood - Echoes of the Elaine Massacre
History is not past, written in books – it’s under our skin and we carry it forward.
In BOUND BY BLOOD, we follow one family and one community 100 years after the Elaine Race Massacre as they explore how to reckon with the past when economic, social and psychological reverberations still linger.
1919 was an explosive time in our history. It was the time of the Red Summer and fear of communism; when African American veterans returned from World War I to face Jim Crow racism. Black sharecroppers in Elaine Arkansas, tired of being cheated out of their profits, decided to unionize. White landowners saw it as an insurrection, and called in white posses from neighboring states to put these sharecroppers in their place. Joined by U.S. Army troops over several days, they killed as many as two hundred black men and women.
Voices of descendants—both victims and perpetrators—and local residents of Phillip County are the film’s storytellers. As their interpretations of the history clash, they also mirror conflicting ways of understanding our obligation to the past and the possibility of reconciliation.
With funding from ITVS, Black Public Media, and the LEF Moving Image Foundation, our team has completed several rounds of filming in Arkansas, Boston and New York City. Currently we are focusing on story development while seeking further funds to finish the film.