When I moved to New York City four years ago I didn’t have a job, I only knew one person and I’d only been to the city once before. But I knew, despite all that, that this was the place for me.

I’d spent the past five years in Chicago. While there I went to school, taught inner city high school kids how to make movies and worked towards my most important goal – to be a filmmaker. After that fifth year I realized that one key ingredient was missing in my quest to make films. That ingredient was community. I had many great friends in the windy city but not a group of people that were interested in doing the things I wanted to do with filmmaking and putting in the work in to make them happen.

I decided to head to New York City with hopes of finding a community of people that I could make films with. I figured a city that played so many movies had to have many folks who wanted to make them as well. The first year was rough. I worked an awful retail job that required me to test out lotions and soaps on random strangers in Herald Square. I went to a lot of films and had a lot of dinners by myself. Eventually I started to get video jobs, one of those being in the Bronx teaching high school students how to make video blogs. While there I met two young men who were just starting an interesting project called Meerkat Media. The goal of Meerkat Media was to make cinema without hierarchy – to abandon traditional roles and use collaboration to tell stories.

As I became better friends with my co-teachers I started to work with them on projects and soon I was a full fledged Meerkat. At the time I joined the collective, which was made up not only of filmmakers but also artists, educators, musicians and activists, they were starting out on what sounded like an ambitious project, to make a documentary that would be collaboratively written, directed and produced by the twelve of us that then made up Meerkat Media.

The focus of the film would be a theater project that was happening on New York City’s Lower East Side at two community centers, University Settlement and The Door. At University Settlement a group of older Puerto Rican women would be working with teaching instructors from The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble to create a play out of the stories of their lives. At The Door, a group of teenagers would be doing the same.

We weren’t so interested in the stakes of whether they would be able to pull off their plays but, much like how we made films, in the process they went through to get to their final performance. The interesting thing to us what what happened when people, whom society gives little voice to, had a space in which they could safely tell the stories of their lives. A space that allowed them to share, create, laugh, cry and be comfortable confronting both their future and their past.

What happened was nothing short of amazing. And while that adjective might seem a little strong for a film that is about teens and old folks telling stories I can assure you it’s not. The stories these women and young adults tell are the stories that define our country, that define all of our lives. They represent where we’re going and where we’ve been and how important it is to talk about both of those places.

Now, two and half years later we are proudly premiering the film, called STAGES, at The New York International Latino Film Festival. And as we get ready to share this special piece of cinema with the world I can’t help but reflect back upon what I’ve learned about filmmaking and storytelling from both the characters in the film and the process by which Meerkat Media documented those characters.

It wasn’t always easy but the lessons learned and the results gained are priceless to me.

1. Consensus Does Work: Whenever I tell anyone that STAGES was directed equally by 12 people the first question they always ask is how? And with that I tell them we used consensus, an organized way to make sure everyone’s voice is heard during discussion. And just as everyone’s voice is heard, you must spend more time listening than you do in most discussions. You’d be amazed at how different filmmaking is when people are genuinely listening to each other. Believe it or not you’re actually able to accomplish quite a lot. Likewise, in STAGES, it is quite extraordinary to watch what happens when people who spend much of their lives alone have people that genuinely care and listen to them. The play they make is also proof positive that consensus not only works but truly aids in the creation of powerful work.

Read the rest and learn where you can get tickets HERE

BabyCakes, the Book of Recipes: It’s Here (Almost)! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.

Come and spend your Saturday doing the things you always do and love – eating, drinking, watching films, listening to music, socializing with creative media makers and help get a feature film made at the same time.  

email us with questions : meerkats@meerkatmedia.org

Antony is the only musician that can make me cry. Sigh.  Also, below is a video I made back in the day on my 25th birthday in my childhood home of Ohio. It’s a good send off to summer. Sigh.

Tuesday, September 23rd @ 8pm

217 E. 42nd St.

The tears are still fresh on my face: