#HenryCorra

[campaignsoftheworld]

Same Sex America documentary by Henry Corra currently streaming on Hulu via SHOWTIME®

The award-winning documentary Same Sex America from renowned filmmaker Henry Corra has been re-released this summer and is currently streaming on Hulu via SHOWTIME®. The film, originally aired on Showtime in 2005, captures a watershed moment in LGBTQ civil rights history through the eyes of seven gay couples trying to be among the first in the U.S. to legally marry. The film was nominated for the prestigious GLADD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. In the midst of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and Pride celebrations around the globe this summer, the re-release of Same Sex America is incredibly timely. Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to sanction same sex marriages. “It was about human rights then and it’s about human rights now,” says Corra.

Watch Trailor Stream Movie The idea for the film originated in late 2003 when Corra read the news that the Massachusetts State Supreme Court mandated that same-sex marriage licenses would be issued as of May 17, 2004. “It was a big constitutional moment and a heated political battle had erupted. All eyes were on Massachusetts. I knew that the next six months would be fraught with political and personal drama,” explains the Director. “Events were unfolding so fast when we approached Robert Greenblatt, then head of Showtime. He green-lit the project immediately, and we hit the road for the Boston Statehouse. The rest is history.” Corra says he wanted to make an intimate film that took the viewer up close and personal against the looming political backdrop of the struggle. “By the end of the story,” Corra adds, “you are so involved with the couples and their families and this explosion of weddings that you just fall in love with these people who love each other and just want to be married and have families. It’s an ecstatic moment for all.” Audrey Roth, a former attorney and one of the film’s main subjects, was filmed with her then-partner Robin and their daughter Phoebe and understands the relevancy of their story today. “We find ourselves once again at a pivotal moment in civil rights in the United States, wondering whether or not our rights will be overturned,” she points out. “Our daughter is 19 now, and she is in the streets marching with her friends.” For Audrey, collaborating with Director Henry Corra on this film was a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. “Henry came into our home and filmed us, but it was just like talking to a friend,” she recalls. “He was so easy with his questions and what he was filming, that we didn’t even notice the camera was there most of the time.” In addition to celebrating the re-release of Same Sex America this summer, filmmaker Henry Corra – best known for his unique brand of nonfiction “Living Cinema” – is currently working on yet another compelling new documentary project, “Unlocked,” which is somewhat of a follow-up to his HBO film George, made with and about his own autistic son. With “Unlocked,” Corra attempts to reach the supposedly unreachable, a group of severe autistics who are learning to speak their first words and connecting to the world in a way no one around them thought possible. “Unlocked” is a film about the journey of walking out of a prison into the bright sunlight.

Watch the "Unlocked" trailer “Unlocked” is mid-way through production with plans for a 2020 release. Corra and his production company Corra Films, based in New York, have also recently collaborated with long-term client Mercedes on an MBUSA campaign (“Greatness Lives Here”), and are now working on a Street Smarts PSA campaign with METRO and the DC Department of Transportation. About Henry Corra: Henry Corra is an Emmy-nominated American Documentary Filmmaker best known for pioneering what he calls "Living Cinema.” Corra’s films have been exhibited worldwide in theatrical venues and broadcast and streaming outlets such as HBO, Showtime, LOGO, CBS, PBS, vH1, Arte, Channel 4, Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, Sundance and Fandor. His work has also been exhibited in the museum and cultural venues internationally including MoMA, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art, the Pacific Film Archive and the Smithsonian Institute, and is on permanent collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A Sundance and Tribeca Institute Fellow, he has also done episodic TV projects for broadcasters including MTV, VH1, Bravo, and the Sundance Channel. In addition to his film work, Corra has been singled out as one of the foremost Directors of Nonfiction Commercials and Advocacy Advertising in America with groundbreaking campaigns for clients including the American Cancer Society, NYC Health, Mercedes Benz USA, Jet Blue, Starbucks and Google. Corra’s work is characterized by a deep and intense relationship with his subjects, his painterly eye, and his novelist sensibility. His first feature, the award-winning “Umbrellas” (PBS/Arte, 1995), shows the deep passions of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on a world stage and the inherently dramatic and at times painful consequences of their work. With “George” (HBO, 2000), made with and about his autistic son, Corra created a unique cinematic language that dramatized their relationship and confronted preconceived notions of autism. “Same Sex America” (Showtime, 2005), captures a watershed moment in civil rights history through the eyes of seven gay couples trying to marry. “NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell” (VH1, 2007) was Emmy-nominated for “Outstanding Arts & Cultural Programming.” “Jack” (2009) is a road movie that’s a loving and poetic portrait of a full-blown alcoholic that challenges conventional ideas about addiction. “The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan” (short-listed for the Independent Spirit Award, 2010) follows the Nolan family from the cotton belt of Texas, to the battlegrounds of Vietnam, to the killing fields of Cambodia and unfolds as a mysterious fever dream. Corra’s latest genre-breaking work, “Farewell to Hollywood” (theatrical release, 2015), is a nonfiction fairytale about love, death, art, holding on and letting go. About Corra Films: The company was founded in 1994 by Filmmaker Henry Corra, a protégé of documentary pioneers the Maysles Brothers. Corra‘s work has inspired a generation of Nonfiction Filmmakers. Under his direction, they are a passionate ensemble of New York’s most innovative talent. Their films are seen by millions around the world: in theaters, on television, streaming video, and across the web. They provoke profound engagement and dialogue. They make groundbreaking and award-winning nonfiction features. They help the top global brands define themselves with real people, TV commercials and digital content. And they lead the charge on the most urgent advocacy campaigns. And, always, they help powerfully unique individuals leave lasting and timeless legacies. www.corrafilms.com Read the full article

[farewelltohollywood]

Henry's Independent Spirit Award Statement

I grew up in a middle-class suburb of Richmond, Virginia, during the 1960’s and ‘70s, during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. I was too young to perceive the radical changes going on right outside my family’s door, as the civil rights movement came to the South. Our paved suburb was literally built around poor black rural neighborhoods with dirt roads, a metaphorical geography that I only dimly perceived. I remember the “coloreds only” drinking fountains, and I recall that my Vermont Yankee mom (A Doris Day look-a-like) organized a Saturday morning racially “mixed” doubles match at the segregated Byrd Park tennis courts. Traffic backed up as gawkers took in the scene, though the significance of the event would not dawn on me until years later.

Puzzling images of Vietnam and assassinations reached me via TV.  From the backseat of our car, I glimpsed demonstrations and near riots.  But if none of this global turmoil pierced my veil of childhood security, I couldn’t escape the fallout of my parents’ ugly divorce. For my activist mother, who fought so loudly against discrimination, it was a cruel irony to find her self banished from her country club and social network. She encouraged her three sons (she had no daughters) to become artists because, as she put it, “artists can move freely among people.” Those words propelled me to New York City.

Three decades later, after an art school education and a long apprenticeship with the Maysles Brothers, I am an established nonfiction filmmaker with my own production company and dozens of notable films to my name. Although New York is still my home, I find that the images of childhood, so puzzling at the time, now inform much of my work.  With The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, I met the Nolan family in the “black belt” of Texas and everything that had been so peripheral to me as a kid now helped me recognize a classic story of America in the late 20th Century.

The work that preceded the McKinley Nolan film has been difficult to classify. Although my films have shown around the world and received much critical praise, reviewers and festival programmers have often found them difficult to place in the context of established genres. If they share a common theme, it is in my intention to explore the possibilities of documentary as a subjective and personal art form. Rather than consider myself a dispassionate observer, I have looked for ways to foreground the connection between my subjects and myself and create a relationship that grows more complex and nuanced as the film unfolds. In exchange for letting me into their lives, I demonstrate that my presence affects their stories. I am not above the fray. We—the filmmaker, the subjects, and by extension, the audience—are in it together.

Umbrellas was my directing debut, a trial by fire where I stepped out of the Maysles’ shadow and fought for the film I needed to make. It is a film that shows the deep passions of the artists Christo and Jean-Claude on a world stage and the inherently dramatic and at times painful consequences of their work.  With George, made with and about my autistic son, I tried to find a unique cinematic language that dramatized our relationship. Adding another narrative level, I also showed how HBO executives, after viewing rushes of the film, confronted their own preconceived notion of that relationship and of autism in general. For Jack, I took a 3000-mile road trip with an alcoholic. When I made the film, I had recently made the decision to become sober, but my goal was not to condemn an addict’s self-destructive behavior, but rather to paint a sober (in both senses) picture of Jack that was both loving and vicarious.

Same Sex America captures a watershed moment in civil rights’ history through the eyes of seven gay couples trying to marry. My goal was not so much to make the audience “forget” that these couples were gay, but rather to make their homosexuality irrelevant. I wanted their stories to seem universal, a quest for the basic rights that straight couples take for granted, much as I did as a clueless kid in Richmond.

I continue to explore the boundaries of deeply personal films in my latest work. For FAREWELL TO HOLLYWOOD, I spent several years embedded with subject and collaborator 17 - 19 year old Regina Nicholson. The film is a poetic non-fiction fairytale about love, death, art, holding on and letting go. She has taught me more about life than anyone I’ve ever met.  The Torah Project, a film-in-progress in consideration at HBO, is the story of a woman’s quest for justice after she escaped a sexually abusive Amish family to become the first Amish ivy-league graduate. Buddy is a lifetime work-in-progress in which I make a short film (90 seconds or less) that epitomizes each year of my life. I’m 58 (and counting), and I feel as though this film has just begun. I look forward to discovering its denouement.

As I look back at my work so far, I think The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan represents my most successful attempt to place an intensely personal story within the context of tectonic historical shifts. For the Nolans, of course, McKinley’s story is not symbolic, but painfully real. But I hope I made a document of their lifelong quest for the truth that reveals universal truths about personal identity and what it means to be American.

I am proud that I have been able to surround myself with a shop that has been so prolific while remaining focused on personal filmmaking. I never want to stop searching for new aesthetic strategies to make documentary windows into the quirks that make up the human experience. I have never doubted that this is what I want to be my lifelong project.  But I can’t think of a bigger honor than the Independent Spirit award, because if there is a common thread that runs through all my work, it is about the joy and pain of carving an independent identity in a world that uses conformity and categorization to crush our spirit.

That is why I have never been bothered by people’s disinclination to slot my films into neat categories. As long as every project is a life-changing event for me, the subjects—and, ideally, the audience—I know I’ve done my job. One programmer recently told me that McKinley Nolan is an amazing film to watch, but almost impossible to describe. I can’t think of a better summation of the alchemy of film. I also can’t think of higher praise.

    -  Henry Corra