
Ben Proudfoot
2021Rwanda & Juliet
Ben Proudfoot
A feature documentary set in Kigali, Rwanda, the epicenter of the genocide that left a million dead two decades earlier. The film follows eccentric retired Dartmouth Professor Emeritus, Andrew Garrod, as he mounts Romeo and Juliet with college students from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds. Hopes, expectations, pasts, personalities and cultures collide as opening night approaches.
Rwanda & Juliet
A Concerto Is a Conversation
Kris Bowers, Ben Proudfoot
Kris Bowers, Horace Bowers, Sr.
A virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer tracks his family's lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
A Concerto Is a Conversation
Almost Famous: The Silent Pulse of the Universe
Ben Proudfoot
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to study radio astronomy at Glasgow University, where she was the only woman in many of her classes. In 1967, Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars — compact, spinning celestial objects that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses. (A visualization of some early pulsar data is immortalized as the album art for Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures.”)
Almost Famous: The Silent Pulse of the Universe
Almost Famous: The Unchosen One
Ben Proudfoot
Devon Michael
It was the late 1990s, and 3,000 young actors around the world were scouted for the role of a lifetime. On the ride home from school, Devon Michael’s mom told him he’d be auditioning for "The Phantom Menace," one of the most anticipated movies ever. From 3,000, the producers narrowed it down to three, and soon Michael was at Skywalker Ranch doing a test screen with George Lucas and Natalie Portman.
Almost Famous: The Unchosen One