Karissa Lee Staples (“Necessary Roughness”) and Brant Daugherty (“Pretty Little Liars”) star in the cheerful romantic comedy, “Merry Kissmas,” available on Digital HD and On Demand December 1, 2015 from MarVista Digital Entertainment. Directed by Michael Feifer, the film also stars Doris Roberts (“Everybody Loves Raymond”), David O’Donnell (“Christmas Under Wraps”), Ion Overman (Madea Goes to Jail) and Brittany Underwood (“One Life to Live”).
Kayla Hansen’s long-term relationship with Tony-winning choreographer Carlton Peters is on the rocks, mainly because Carlton treats her more like his personal assistant than his girlfriend. However, the two have agreed to not address their rocky relationship until after Christmas and Carlton’s new production of “The Nutcracker.” When Kayla shares an impromptu mistletoe kiss in an elevator with handsome Dustin Casey, she feels that she has finally and serendipitously encountered the love of her life. However, due to Dustin’s previously failed relationships, he shies away from expressing his feelings, and when Carlton starts wooing Kayla to give their relationship a second chance, Kayla’s love life becomes even more complicated. This holiday season, Kayla must follow her heart, and make a few wishes along the way to find true love.
Available December 1, 2015 on Amazon, Comcast Xfinity, Google Play, iTunes, Vimeo and VUDU, as well as On Demand with Charter, DirecTV, Verizon, and Vubiquity.
The African Children’s Choir is more than a performing group. It is a chance. Children from the direst poverty who tour with the group get to see the world. They go to school. And when they grow up, their education is paid for through college. A touching and inspiring new documentary about the group is called “Imba Means Sing,” available December 4, 2015 on VOD. In an interview producer Erin Bernhardt explained how she became involved with the group and what the children taught her.
Copyright 2015 Imba Film
How did you meet the choir?
I met the African Children’s Choir the summer after I graduated from the University of Virginia. I had already committed to the Peace Corps but I wasn’t going to move to Madagascar until September. So I had that summer off and number one selling indie rock band of all time, Dispatch brought me on to be their outreach coordinator for a big benefit concert they had, a three night event at Madison Square Garden for Africa. And that’s how I met the choir. We had the kids come perform with the guys at the Garden and meeting those kids just totally changed my life. The children were from Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya and they were all orphans and they had nothing back home. They had no running water, no electricity, no parents, no toys, no education and thanks to being in the African Children’s Choir their education was now going to be funded through college. So they would be able to go on to achieve their dreams. They were the happiest, most joyful kids that I had ever met in my entire life, actually the most joyful people I had ever met, and it really changed my perspective on what mattered in life.
So for eight and a half years I’ve been wanting to tell their story and it’s really exciting that it’s finally happening. After the concert, I left them, moved to Madagascar, lost touch with them. I came home and worked at CNN for three years as a writer and producer mostly covering politics and then four and a half years ago I went with one of my best friends to Uganda to do a story for CNN about her social enterprise, the Akola Project. I ran into the choir my first day in Uganda, the same kids. I had gotten Croc, the plastic shoe company, to donate shoes for the kids in New York in 2007 and then in 2010 I saw those kids wearing those shoes and they were just doing really, really well. So I made a documentary about them for CNN and then I left to make this feature film because I wanted to reach younger audiences and be able to get the film in schools, and have it really make a difference.
The children in the film really are always joyful. And yet they have so little and as they travel through the United States they can see how much others have that they do not. What keeps them so cheerful?
When you ask them why they’re so happy, they say God. So if you talk to them about why you’re so happy, why are you so well behaved, why do you always have a good attitude, why are you so thoughtful? Their answer to all of those question is God.
For the kids in Uganda and a lot of developing countries spirituality is a lot more alive. It’s not just like an intellectual thing in their head and it’s not just something that is in your heart that you talk about. These kids come from communities where anything good that happens they think it’s happening because of God. That’s just how their life is in their villages and even in their slums. They just have so much faith. They talk about it and they live it and they wear it on their sleeves. So that’s really how they live. They realize how lucky they are that they have this opportunity and they totally give that credit to God for picking them and letting them have this opportunity to change their life and their families’ lives.
The film has a very intimate feel. And the performances are filmed very dynamically. What kind of crew did you have? And how big?
To me it was big, it was bigger than the crews that we use on CNN. I had a director of photography who was always using one or two cameras and a director who was doing the second or third camera and then we always had a field audio mixer because the audio was really, really important for the film because it was about music so we always had that. And then we had a production assistant who would be helping with writing and making sure everyone in the other rooms nearby were quiet and all that stuff and then me, the producer. For performances, we had two or three cameras at the time and always an audio person and sometimes you have to bring in extra audio people or extra photographers.”
The choir performed in a wide variety of venues. What were the ones that they enjoyed the most?
They loved singing at the Atlanta Braves baseball games. I think that was really fun for them to have such a huge audience. At that point they had been at only one baseball game before and that was a minor-league with a really small stadium and a really small crowd. So I think that this was beyond their wildest expectations and they loved that. They really liked performing at the Grand Canyon because it was just really fun. They weren’t as into the vast landscape of the Grand Canyon as they were into the snow there. They stayed and made snowmen and had snowball fights and then they sang. So they definitely loved it.
How did you make the children comfortable with you so that they were so unselfconscious in the film?
What makes me be able to tell really intimate character-driven stories is that I’m just really honest with all of the people I work with and it allows me to tell stories about people that I really love. And so they can tell that I genuinely love them and care about them and the kids, you know kids can see through anything so the kids really knew that I had their best interest in mind and the second they were selected for the choir I was there. So they didn’t know life in the choir without me around and without all the cameras around. So really their new life as members of the choir started with us there, too. So I think it would have been harder if they had been on tour for a while and then we came into the picture but it was really natural.
At first we were using a big camera and I had a different crew and that didn’t work so I ended up hiring a crew that worked better with the kids. They used smaller cameras. The kids never paid attention to us when we were rolling but when we weren’t rolling they would play with us, and they hung out with us and we would all be really mindful of spending time with the other 17 kids who weren’t the main characters of the film, too. We ate tons of meals with them and had tons of fun with them and everything off-camera. And they are singing professionally to make money and they are the news a lot so they know what’s going on; they are very smart and very wise.
What did they find most memorable in the US?
They volunteered at a few homeless shelters and Boys and Girls Clubs and I think they really liked that. They like seeing what Americans do for the less fortunate because in Uganda it’s mostly Westerners helping the less fortunate but in America they saw black Americans helping black Americans and I think that they definitely took that with them. But Anthony , who hadn’t been to America since he was eight, when he started touring, he as an adult was really bothered by the fact that we have homeless people in America. He was like “I don’t understand how that’s possible. Everything that you guys have, like we stay on tour in these mansions with pools and slides and families where each kid has their own bathroom and bedroom.” So he is was like, “I just don’t understand how you have homeless people, it just doesn’t make any sense.” So it’s interesting what the perspective of an eight-year-old is versus a 28-year-old. Of course, they are both right. For my grandmother’s birthday my cousin and I made a donation to the Survivor Initiative, which helps Holocaust survivors who are living in poverty.
Exclusive Clip: Bryan Greenberg in “A Year and Change”
Posted on November 23, 2015 at 1:08 pm
After falling off the roof at a New Year’s Eve house party, Owen (Bryan Greenberg) decides that it’s time to make some wholesale changes in his life. Over the next year, he quits drinking, reconnects with his son, reignites old friendships, and falls in love with Vera, a bank teller and fellow divorcee. It’s released by Vision Films to DVD and VOD November 24, 2015 for Thanksgiving.
Best-selling author Tom Rath writes books about how anyone can find more energy and joy. Now his work is explored fuller in a new documentary called “Fully Charged.” Rath and experts from academia, medicine, business, religion, and the military talk about the small changes anyone can make, and demonstrate the extraordinary results.
It is not easy, but it is simple. Eating better, exercising more, getting sleep, connecting more deeply with those we care about, and tapping into our innate gratitude and generosity gives us a feeling of purpose and meaning that gives us more energy, more joy, and more satisfaction. It’s just the thing for for a reminder of what matters in the midst of holiday stress and New Year’s resolutions.
Copyright Jeff Hutchens 2015What does it truly mean to be “pro-life?” For many who consider themselves conservatives, it means to be anti-abortion. For many who consider themselves liberals, it means to be against gun violence. One leading evangelical minister, a founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, begins to grapple with this dichotomy in “Armor of Light,” a new documentary from Abigail Disney. While she considers herself liberal, she specifically went in search of someone who would be willing to explore what it truly means to be “pro-life,” and that led her to Rob Schenck, of Faith and Action, which says: “Our purpose is to affect the hearts and minds of America’s public policy makers with Christ’s mandate in the two Greatest Commandments: Love the Lord Your God with All Your Heart, Soul, Strength, and Mind, and Love Your Neighbor as Yourself….ur mission—to challenge our nation’s leaders with biblical truth.”
Disney says: “I have found this to be true: if you approach people with respect and an open heart, they will almost always respond to you in the same way. So Rob and I formed the most unlikely of friendships and it was in that spirit that we went forward on this journey together, poking into the darkest of political corners, asking the hardest, most sensitive of questions and pushing back on some of the most dearly held American creeds.”
It was not until gun violence came literally almost to Schenck’s own doorstep that he felt he had to act. The second-deadliest shooting on a US Army base occurred in Washington DC’s Navy Yard, just steps from Schenck’s home. He knows that most of the people who provide financial support for his efforts and many of his friends and faith community are passionate advocates for the right to own guns in any quantity and of any kind. The movie shows him listening with great compassion and patience to some of his closest colleagues and friends. They explain that they see the Biblical imperative as protecting their families, and the only way to achieve that is through unlimited access to guns.
The movie also tells the story of Lucy McBath, whose teenage son’s tragic death is also the subject of another excellent documentary, “3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets.” McBath’s son Jordan stopped at a gas station with his friends the day after Thanksgiving 2012. Another customer, Michael Dunn, shot and killed him, and then tried to defend himself under the “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows the use of force if the shooter “perceives” a threat. He was later convicted and is serving a life sentence. McBath is now devoting her life to working with the faith community to combat gun violence.
Disney’s sympathetic camera allows both Schenck and McBath to tell their stories in a personal and compelling manner. She explores Schenck’s Jewish upbringing, and his finding in evangelical Christianity a faith that would help him make sense of the Holocaust genocide and a purpose in trying to protect life. And McBath is the daughter of a man who worked with Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement. She ties her passion for justice to his example. This is a powerful film, all the more so because it struggles with its subjects to find common cause and because it shows compassion and respect for the sincerity and good will of all.
Parents should know that violence is a theme of the film and there are references to tragic deaths and gun violence, as well as brief strong language.
Family discussion: What do you think “pro-life” means? What arguments are most persuasive on gun violence and why? The title of the film is taken from Romans 13:12 — what does it mean?
