ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
Looking to the past to explore a path to the future. Interviews with key figures in the African-American Freedom Movement.

SYNOPSIS
BELOVED COMMUNITY is based on the assumption that the heroes and exemplars of what came to be called the African-American Freedom Movement have much still to tell us, and to show us, in our current tumultuous time.

While many of these people have already passed from the scene, a number of people who were a part of those original struggles and who walked the line with Dr. Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ralph Abernathy, Diane Nash and others are still alive and still have something to tell us.

The intention of BELOVED COMMUNITY is to interview those people and gather their first person stories of those times while also asking them their views on the current situation. How do they feel things have changed? What still needs to be changed? What methods and theories from the past are still relevant today and what, as they see it, might be done anew?

The single most important aspect of the film is the attempt to interview as many of the people who were directly involved in the freedom struggle of the 50s and 60s while they are still around, and then work with the activists and organizers of today to piece together a picture of how the historical meets the contemporary.

We want to ask the two-fold question: Does the Beloved Community remain a dream, and a possibility for today and, if so, how do we learn from the past and bring the dream to fruition today?

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Thom E. Butler
PRODUCER Thom E. Butler

WEBSITE thebelovedcommunity.online