Excerpts from MediaStorm's channel showcased above include A Shadow Remains, The Last Move, Fight Hate with Love, Common Ground, Driftless, Rite of Passage, Hungry Horse, Love in the First Person, The Marlboro Marine and Swan Song.
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As a young boy, Michael “OG LAW” Ta’Bon’s mother lost her vision. Michael cared for his mother as best he could.
As a teenager, he met his father, Malik. He taught Michael about drugs, and together they fueled their habits through crime.
As a young man, Michael was arrested for armed robbery and spent 15 years in prison.
As a prisoner, Michael discovered God, and sought to change his life, and the lives of others.
As a formerly incarcerated person, Michael struggled for work, and found purpose in being a husband, father, and activist. His activism became an increasingly important part of who he was. Michael took ownership of his past and used it to keep others out of prison.
Michael’s wife, Gwen Jackson, a successful singer and actress who has performed with Sheryl Crow, Harry Belafonte and Cirque Du Soleil, was supportive of his efforts.
But seven years since his release from prison, the cost of Michael’s passion is evident. There is tension in the home over where Michael should be, and what he should be doing. His father, his sister, his wife, his stepson, and many others constantly remind him that his focus is in the wrong place. That his passion for keeping children out of prison, while admirable, is costing him his place as a father and husband.
Michael is largely alone in his single-mindedness, understanding the tension in his own family, but not able to accept seeing those around him making the same mistakes that he made as a child. And as the world around him turns to the issues he’s spoken about for years, Michael’s determination and focus is only sharpened. This tension is amplified by the invisible wounds Michael has suffered over the course of his life. The memories of his experience in prison weigh on him heavily.
His history, his family, his faith, his community, and the realities of the world around him, are all working with and against one another, in Michael’s eyes, for the betterment or destruction of his goal to change the world. A deeply complicated confluence of motivations and realities blur his understanding what is possible, and what is right under the ever watchful eyes of his family, and his God.
Fight Hate with Love is a deeply personal look into those cavernous realities.
Chris Capozziello is a professional photojournalist. He has spent more than a decade documenting his twin brother, Nick. Nick, only five minutes younger, was born with Cerebral Palsy.
As the years go by, the difference between the brothers’ lives grows larger. Nick, now in his mid-thirties, still lives with his parents, in the house he grew up in. He frequently complains that they treat him like a child, although physically he feels more like an old man. Meanwhile, Chris suffers a chronic sense of guilt for being capable in ways that his brother is not.
At age 35, Nick is finally able to take his first steps towards independence, But is he ready? His parents seem to think so, but Chris fears the worst. “It's like that feeling you get in your gut that tells you that something bad is going to happen, and there's nothing you can do to stop that.”
How does the death of a child change a parent? How does the death of a parent change a child?
How do these moments change us as we develop and grow further away from who we were as children?
Phillip Toledano is an artist who lives in New York City with his wife Carla and little girl, Loulou.
His life has been marked by the passing of family. Each death diverting the river slightly. His sister’s established a pattern of resistance. His mother’s gave him perspective on his childhood. His father’s showed him the power of unapologetic love.
A Shadow Remains explores Toledano's personal history as he considers the impact that love and loss has had on his life, and the life of his family.
His unique, yet universal experience delves deeply into questions of identity and the ability to manage death in an honest and often humorous manner.
"I'm so clearly conscious of everything that they gave me now. Now that they're gone their shadow remains and I see what a strong and lengthy shadow that is."
Maggie Steber was an only child. Madje Steber was a single parent. They were all the family they had and it wasn't easy.
Madje divorced when Maggie was only six months old. Strong and independent, Madje raised her daughter in the small Texas town of Electra, near the Oklahoma border. She had a keen awareness of what others might be thinking of a young single mother at a time when that was often viewed as a scarlet letter. Their tiny house had strict rules and a formality that rubbed Maggie the wrong way, especially during her teenage years. Their relationship was strained with arguments and threats to move out. At the age of twenty-one, Maggie finally did.
"I wanted to leave, I had to leave," Maggie says. "I went to New York to find my fortune, and there I found it."
That fortune was as an internationally acclaimed photojournalist. She covered everything from fashion to war and completed stories in 62 different countries. She worked routinely for National Geographic, was the Director of Photography for the Miami Herald and taught at various universities and workshops.
As the years passed and Madje grew older, her memory began to fade. Maggie tried to help, but her busy career kept her away from Texas. She was only was able to visit a few times year. To this day, Maggie wonders if she did enough for her aging mother. Eventually it became apparent, Madje had dementia.
The disease proved relentless and Madje could not live alone anymore. Maggie was faced with an issue that more and more Americans must deal with as the massive baby-boomer population grows older. Maggie moved her mother to Miami to care for her. "This is my last chance to do it right," Maggie says.
Over the next few years, Maggie turned her professional eye on her own life, documenting Madje's life in an assisted living facility. The images speak to the pain of loss, the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship and the fragility of life. They reveal beauty in a liberation from the roles Maggie and Madje had learned to play as mother and daughter. They speak to both the harsh and humorous realities of life with a diminished parent and contain lessons for all of us as we face these issues in our own lives.
"This body of work is the most important one I have ever done," says Maggie, "and will ever do. It's Madje's story, but really and truly, it's my story."
It’s 2010.
Tom and Nacole’s daughter is missing. She’s run away from the home they built for her.
Within 48 hours she’ll be forced into a life of prostitution.
It’s 2007.
Lisa is 13 years old and on the streets. She needs to find a way to survive.
She’ll spend the next six years trying to cope with that decision.
It’s 2005.
Andy is arresting a girl for the second time. Frustrated, he asks her “Why?”
The answer will change his life.
Set in Seattle Washington, The Long Night, a feature film by Tim Matsui and MediaStorm, gives voice and meaning to the crisis of minors who are forced and coerced into the American sex trade. The film weaves together the stories of seven people whose lives have been forever changed by this issue.
The Long Night is not themed to advocate a solution. Instead, it submerges the viewer in the experience of what it has been like for Natalie and Lisa to survive in the life; for Tom and Nacole to watch their daughter slip out of their hands; for Andy and his fellow police officers, Brian and Joel, to try to create a more just system.
The Long Night is testimony to the lives of those who have lived this crisis.
Thousands of feet above the earthen crust you cruise at altitude, bathed in the exhalation of others, while wingtip strobes staccato blush the riveted metal that surrounds you.
And while you drift in and out of sleep, flying further away from home, you cross datelines, and pass through plains of lingual dominance as English grammar dissolves into unfamiliar tones.
Descending through night clouds, you look down to see the tungsten dots of naked filaments eking out their existence like dying embers spit from the shacks nesting in shadowed hillsides.
Then you wonder, did you remember to turn off your hall light?
As the tires skid and add their rubber signature to this foreign runway’s hieroglyphs, you take one last breath of pressurized air, tap your passport in your pocket, and exit into a new land, a blank persona, traveling anonymously.
Ulaanbaatar. N'Djamena. Ankara. Kyoto. Manaus. Kolkata. Pittsburgh.
Once you leave, no one knows you were there.
Hungry Horse: Legends of the Everyday, is a film series and photography project created by internationally acclaimed photographer Pieter ten Hoopen in collaboration with MediaStorm.
In the films, Pieter touches on the struggles of poverty, drug use, loneliness and loss. But he more accurately captures the spirit of renewal, peace and serenity in the lives of the people he documents through stunning landscapes and intimate oral histories. Hungry Horse: Legends of the Everyday follows the mythical structure of its subjects’ lives, Charlie, Katie and Brad Lee, and it is through their stories, and Pieter's powerful imagery that we learn about the timeless cycle of adventure, loss and renewal.