This week at Alive Mind we're very focused on finalizing our upcoming releases. We screen many docs for potential acquisition but only select the most compelling, such as Academy Award® winning Jessica Yu's Protagonist.

Jessica Yu masterfully weaves four contemporary stories into a provocative narrative that does not seek to judge its subjects or make political pronouncements, but rather to use these stories as a window into human nature.

Her four protagonists are average men and uniquely exceptional. At the heart of each man's story is the quest to transcend his imperfections. While each man's motivation is highly personal, the stories demonstrate how the individual struggle between fate and character can have far-reaching consequences.

The Hollywood Reporter describes Protagonist as "…a fresh and bracing slant to the psychology of personality…her documentary look(s) at four lives defined by fanaticism," and according to Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com, Protagonist is “…also a highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.” We look forward to making this title available for pre-order April 15th. Sign-up for our newsletter and receive a 10% coupon towards your purchase.

Last Saturday night, I was privileged to attend Richard Dawkins’ lecture sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and hosted by the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The line snaked down the block on West 64th St. and curled around the corner on to Broadway. After the standing room only presentation, Professor Dawkins answered questions and autographed books. If you missed him on his latest tour, he is interviewed in The Atheism Tapes at length by Jonathan Miller about what his critics deem a dogmatic disbelief… watch the clip below and then head on over to Secular Philosophy to see what other people are saying about science and the limits of knowledge.



Here at Alive Mind we believe in helping those who support us. Our affiliate network is expanding rapidly. We are pleased to welcome the Military Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers, and Ex Christian and American Atheists as the latest members to our affiliate team. Don’t miss the American Atheist Convention March 21 – 23rd in Minneapolis. There is an all star line-up of speakers, including Richard Dawkins, Eddie Tabash and Laurence Krauss, to name only a few. Our “affiliate of the week” is The Secular Student Alliance, so when you purchase The Atheism Tapes DVD, we will donate $3 to support their activities on campuses across the country. Just click here…

Likewise with Women and Spirituality, affiliates continue to join from around the globe. When you purchase Women and Spirituality this week, we will donate $3 to Starhawk’s foundation.

I am happy to report that filmmaker, eco activist, Wiccan and feminist Starhawk is back safe and sound after an unexpected stay at an Israeli jail after she was denied entrance at the border. You can read her personal story over at Women and Spirituality. Welcome home, Starhawk, from all of us at Alive Mind.

And that’s the weekly buzz for this week.

Allbest,

Elizabeth Sheldon and the Alive Mind Team

 

The big news at Alive Mind is our upcoming releases... and our star for the week is Academy Award winning director Jessica Yu's Protagonist. Here is another rave review from Stephen Holden of the New York Times:

The four men who relate their life stories in “Protagonist,” Jessica Yu’s enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery, are all disillusioned (and extremely articulate) true believers. When they were younger, they were certain they had found the Answer. One embraced terrorism, another crime, a third martial arts and the fourth missionary Christianity as ways of transcending painful, oppressive childhoods that left them with feelings of inadequacy and shame.

Ms. Yu, who won the Oscar for best documentary short in 1997 for “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien,” states in the production notes for this film that her concept was to find people whose real lives mirrored the “tragedy of the extremist” in Euripides. A character embarks on a journey for valid reasons, only to find himself so embedded in the cause that he becomes the opposite of what he intended and is blind to that fact until “a single moment of dark clarity.”

To this end, the four parallel narratives are interspersed with chapter headings like “Provocation,” “Turning Point,” “Fever” and “Catharsis.” Scenes from the stories are re-enacted by puppets with wooden masks, manipulated by rods on a miniature replica of a classic Greek stage. (The visual design is elegant.) Quotations from Euripides spoken in ancient Greek connect these men with figures in Greek tragedy to suggest that nothing much has changed: now as then, character is destiny.

We’ve been talking to Jessica about sharing with Alive Mind her insights about the film and the impact of its release. We’re planning an extended interview or even a blog from her when she finishes her current film shoot … so stay posted!

Clicking over to Women and Spirituality, the latest provocative conversation is about politics, the importance of friendship, and female archetypes. From the Sacred Prostitute to abandonment, our all star list of first generation feminists and activists provides compelling reading that will never include fashion advice, horoscopes or how the weather affects your hair... promise. And if you're interested in “herstory,” from matriarchies to medieval witch trials to the re emergence of the sacred feminine in eco feminism, look no further! Check out the clips from Donna Read's classic trilogy, Women and Spirituality on our YouTube channel; tell us which one you like best and we’ll post that clip on our sites along with the comments! And coming soon: Signs Out of Time, Donna Read’s and Starhawk’s bio doc about Marija Gambutis, the revolutionary archaeologist who single-handedly over turned traditional concepts of the role of women in pre history.

Over at Secular Philosophy the debating continues about the limits of scientific knowledge and human intellect: can science tell us everything we want to know or is it a descriptive tool that can never answer the Big Question, "Why?" Denys Turner challenges Jonathan Miller in his Atheism Tapes interview during which he criticizes Richard Dawkins's stance that science can answer all questions and the questions that it cannot answer are not only not worth asking but nonsensical. This theme is picked-up by our very own blogger Mark Rowland in his latest post. Check it out to see what people are saying and watch the Denys Turner clip below before deciding for your self. If you want to see more, use the following code to receive a 10% discount when you purchase The Atheism Tapes.

Kiki and Herb continue to rock on and we caught them in person at Bottle Rocket last Monday, where they took questions from the crowd of fans, autographed DVD copies of their live performance, Kiki & Herb: Live at the Knitting Factory, while everybody sipped Beaujolais on a nippy New York evening. Our prez Richard Lorber (right) was there in person along with the producer, Stephen Hendel (left), and a good time was had by all. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Live at the Knitting Factory, don't be shy... click here.

And that's the Weekly Buzz from Alive Mind. Stay tuned... we'll have more announcements next week.

Allbest,

Elizabeth and the Alive Mind Team

Another week has flown by here at Alive Mind. We’ve been busy ramping up our acquisitions and the cornerstone of our direct-to-consumer distribution, our Affiliate Program. Many of our affiliates are non profit organizations, such as the Institute for Humanist Studies, Secular Student Alliance, the Leiter Report, the award-winning online journal Wild River Review, PaGain Cosmology, to name a few! We are honored to work with these organizations and other groups to help them spread their messages even as they help us promote our DVDs.

As promised last week, our president Richard Lorber’s interview with the National Humanist News is now available… listen to the playwright Arthur Miller chatting with Jonathan Miller about being a self-described atheist during the McArthur-era as well as the history of American anti Semitism. And don’t forget, if you’d like to hear more from Arthur Miller, Richard Dawkins, Colin McGinn, Daniel Dennett, Denys Turner or Steven Weinberg discussing their personal and philosophical positions in-depth, we are offering a 20% discount this week if you use the coupon code ATGCDE20. So go ahead, don’t be shy, buy it! The Atheism Tapes are exclusively available from Alive Mind…

We also offer non theatrical rights on all of our titles for use in the classroom or for non-admission paying audiences, which you can read more about it here. As one professor commented over at Secular Philosophy,

“I thoroughly enjoyed the Atheism tapes when they were first released and found the interchange between Colin McGinn and Jonathan Miller particularly clear and compelling. I've since shown it to some of my own philosophy students.”

Check out the clip below to see for yourself:

In case you forgot, March 8^th is International Women’s Day and we are the proud sponsor of the International Women’s Day Virtual Festival . Be sure to read Amina Wadud’s thoughts about being Muslim and a single mother as well as Starhawk’s commentary on the Goddess and a lot of insightful political debate and personal insight regarding gender and politics in the twenty-first century at Women and Spirituality.

We are also pleased to announce that coming in May we will be exclusively releasing Donna Read’s and Starhawk’s bio doc of Marija Gambutis, Signs Out of Time. In addition to Marija’s biography, whose ground breaking theories about matriarchies in early civilizations challenged traditional views, our release will include never-before-available on DVD interviews with feminist scholars Carol Christ and Naomi Goldenberg; poet, activist and artist Deena Metzger; best known author Riane Eisler of the international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future; and University of Cambridge archaeologist Sir Colin Renfrew. This is an indispensable resource for students, teachers and aficionados of anthropology, archaeology, women’s studies and history. Sign up for our Alive Mind newsletter and receive a 10% off coupon for when we release the DVD.

In addition, we will soon be releasing the Academy Award-winning director Jessica Yu’s latest documentary, Protagonist, fresh from its national theatrical release. Read what Andy Bailey of the San Francisco Film Festival wrote about the film,

Is character fate? What could a German terrorist, an "ex-gay" minister, a bank robber and a martial arts enthusiast possibly have in common? How much can the fifth-century Greek playwright Euripides tell us about the modern self and its fundamental limitations? These are but a few of the questions Jessica Yu ponders in Protagonist... Framed as a quartet of first-person, talking-head narratives of disparate men on singular quests, Yu examines each subject’s story through the prism of Euripidean tragedy. The film in fact began as a challenge from the Carr Foundation to make a documentary about Euripides, but Yu soon shifted her focus to the four extremists (whittled down from 200 finalists) who, like so many characters in Euripides, wind up far from their intended destination. Incorporating Greek dialogue culled from Euripides' Bacchae and experimental filmmaker Janie Geiser’s wooden-rod puppetry, Yu puts a historical spin on the plight of her contemporary subjects. Her artful blending of past and present and the remarkable stories of her unusual quartet make for a wonderfully unconventional documentary/essay film on the timelessness of the human struggle.

Click on the image below to get a sneak preview of Protagonist and don’t forget to sign-up for the Alive Mind newsletter and receive a 10% discount when it is released.

Next week I will have several new exciting announcements… so stay tuned and visit our sites: secularphilosophy.com and womenandspirituality.net. Check out why our very own Colin McGinn is provoking his blog readers with his new book, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation; is Colin manipulating his public or does he offer an insightful analysis of the role of mental manipulation in public discourse? Check it out for yourself…

Remember, you heard it here at the Weekly Buzz first.

Allbest,

Elizabeth Sheldon and the Alive Mind team

So many exciting things here at Alive Mind, where to begin?

There was the Sundance Channel interview of Kiki and Herb last Friday for Sundandce's "Spotlight on the Artist" series. In the picture below you can see some stars of our team, Rita Kompelmakher, our director of marketing and distribution and our intern, Jean Ming, with Justin Bond and Kenny Melman (aka Kiki and Herb) at P.S.122, where Justin performed an extended solo. We'll let you know soon when the actual Sundance Channel interview will be available online for viewing.

 

 

Richard Lorber, head of Alive Mind, was also interviewed last week by the National Humanist News, the monthly podcast addressing people, things and events of interest to secularists, sponsored by the Institute for Humanist Studies. The occasion was our new DVD release of the BBC's The Atheism Tapes with Jonathan Miller. The particular focus was a discussion about the in-depth Arthur Miller interview (check out the clip below), one of the last with this great playwright before he died. You will be able to hear Richard's insights very soon right here. Don't miss it by signing up for our RSS feed.

Speaking of which, we are all about "widgets" here at Alive Mind. We adore those technical gadgets that disseminate content through codes easily plugged into web sites. YouTube clips are a perfect example of a widget because you can easily embed them in a site (please check out our YouTube channel), as is our Newsletter sign-up or our RSS feed, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. Subscribe to our RSS feed and our latest Weekly Buzz will be delivered to you automatically without your having to go to our site. We are also adding a photo gallery, so you can catch us in action. If you are at an event - a Kiki and Herb performance, a lecture by one of our bloggers, a seminar or festival that you think might be of interest, send us your photos and check back to see what shots are up on the site.

Our Women and Spirituality DVD continues to receive accolades, which you can check out here. In tandem with our expanding DVD offerings, our affiliate partner network is also growing, extending down under to Australia and much interest coming from Europe and Asia. Next program in the pipeline is Donna Read and Starhawk's "Signs Out of Time," a bio doc of the archaeologist Marija Gambutis, whose ground breaking theories about matriarchies in early civilizations challenged traditional views. The DVD, which will include never-before-released interviews, will be available for pre-order sometime in March.

Coming up in our pipeline, is award-winning director Jessica Yu's feature doc, Protagonist, fresh from its national theatrical release. "Inspired by the plays of Euripides, Jessica Yu brings a fresh and bracing slant to the psychology of personality...her documentary look at four lives defined by fanaticism"; writes the Hollywood Reporter. Entertainment Weekly calls it "...riveting," "...awesome," and according to Variety, "...irresistible and novel," ... clearly it is a must-see documentary.

Don't forget to sign-up for our Newsletter and receive 10% off of your purchase of any of our provocative documentaries.

Stay tuned until next week.

Allbest,

Elizabeth Sheldon and the Alive Mind Team

We've been busy here at Alive Mind building our affiliate network. For every title that we release, we research and reach out to bloggers, websites, organizations and individuals whose interests complement the content of our titles. Those who wish to become our affiliate marketing partners help spread the word about our releases and earn a generous fee that supports their own activities.

This week Atheists and Agnostics at Myspace signed on and placed an announcement on their site for our new offering The Atheism Tapes. Not only do our partners earn a fee but we allow them to pass along a discount to their constituencies or members who buy; in this case, we're also making a donation from every sale to the Secular Student Alliance. There are more affiliates in the pipeline that we will announce next week, so stay tuned. And please do get in touch if you'd like to join our affiliate ranks.

On the blogging front, our Women and Spirituality authors continue in the limelight. Susan Reimer-Torn was featured in the Huffington Post (go Susan!) and interviewed on radio station KMUD in Northern California. There are also many upcoming events with Amina Wadud and Starhawk so check out our W & S site and don't forget to leave a comment... or two.

And for something completely different, sample online our previews of Kiki & Herb's brilliantly satirical rock 'n rantin' new DVD. They just about define our culturally transformative category though they themselves are beyond classification. Catch them live if you can soon in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco. But if you can't, we'll bring Kiki and Herb Live at the Knitting Factory to you. Their premiere DVD is now out exclusively on our Alive Mind label. We'll soon be posting the rave reviews, if you even need that excuse to get this riotous disc!

Otherwise, lots of new good stuff in the pipeline too. We will soon be releasing the Academy Award winning director Jessica Yu's critically acclaimed doc "The Protagonist" about the transformative journeys of four disparate men: a kung fu devotee, an ex terrorist, a former evangelical minister who comes out of the closet and a former bank robber turned journalist. To quote Salon, it's "a highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood..."

One of the cornerstones of our distribution policy at Alive Mind is simultaneously releasing to consumers and educators. We acquire broad rights on our titles so we can offer teachers, librarians and educational organizations the option to purchase our DVD's for public performance use, which allows them to present to larger groups of non-admission paying audiences. Our titles inspire thoughtful discussion and are ideal for educational programs and community events. You can read more about public performance rights here.

Our prez Richard Lorber is back from the Berlin Film Festival where he spent a week screening docs and films and meeting with producers. If you, or one of your friends, has a program you think we should know about, drop us a line.

Finally, have a look at a clip from The Atheism Tapes

 

 

All for now,

Elizabeth Sheldon and the Alive Mind Team