The Odyssey Film Project is a fiscally sponsored project of the International Documentary Association (IDA), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization. Contributions are tax-deductible as allowed by law.
About The Project
With racial justice dividing the nation, a new film delivers a story of hope, connection, and actual change. The Odyssey Project humanizes the issue of systemic inequality in America’s criminal justice system and brings with it an impact campaign that will drive large-scale engagement for solutions.
Using the template of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey Project documents the transformational adventures of four incarcerated male teens of color as they endeavor to find their voices through an experimental applied theater initiative. The film emphasizes insights into the hearts and minds of these misunderstood youth as they reveal their fears, hopes, and aspirations. For seven years, we tracked the adolescents as they navigated back to the world of their homes–their Ithaca. In the process, the teens become heroes in their quest to throw off stigmatizing labels and determine their destinies.
Status
The Odyssey Project is a feature-length documentary in the final stages of production. 90% of the principal filming is complete. Fundraising is underway for post-production work, including fine editing, score, and graphics. Release is planned for early 2023.
Film Synopsis
The story follows four incarcerated youths undertaking a six-week performing arts curriculum of specialized modules, mentored by university faculty, and working alongside undergraduate students as their peers. The teens engage in a series of theater practices that culminate in a public performance of a self-authored adaptation of the Homeric epic poem, the Odyssey. The theater program utilizes the themes of self-examination and self-discovery inherent to the poem as a template for marginalized youth to fashion their own journey, creating a sense of empowerment, liberation, and self-determination.
The film evaluates the program’s mission to enable these young offenders to take control of their lives through their decision making to see a future beyond the arbitrary limitations of economy, ethnicity, or education imposed by society and intergenerational trauma. The film documents the entire process, from the orientation/audition and workshop to the accomplishment of performing at a community theater, beginning with the ice-breaking moment when the undergraduates and incarcerated youth first encounter one another and capturing the ups and downs of rehearsal.
The popular media narrative continues to define youthful criminal behavior in terms of deviancy and thus inherently worthy of penalty. However, the incarcerated teens in The Odyssey Project seek to challenge, contest, and destabilize this assumptive logic by engaging in artistic modalities that leverage personal stories to reimagine their lives as heroes rather than criminals. Beyond the theater arts program, the film tracks the four adolescents in an uphill battle as they navigate through the world of their homes–their Ithaca.
Now, the film has given rise to a groundbreaking academic study showing racial bias in unequivocal terms, and everything could change. Armed with this study, the film’s lead character has won a major victory against inequities in incarceration and sentencing. The Odyssey Project reveals the heroic struggle to achieve what every child deserves: a fair chance. But the journey is not over. The rest is up to us.
Unique Collaboration
The Odyssey Project film team is working with the young men as co-producers, providing the team unparalleled access while granting the film’s subjects rare control over their own stories and participation in revenue from distribution and sales.
Art is a wound turned into light. George Braque
Team
Michael Morgan, Producer
Michael Morgan is the executive producer. The film is based on The Odyssey Project® that he spearheaded in 2011. The significance of the film connects with his origins growing up in Harlem where he came to understand the survival choices that dominate the youth in tough neighborhoods. A lifelong actor and instructor, he has discovered that facilitating someone to go on and believe in their potential and shift their lives from destructive to productive has been his highest calling as a teacher. Through documentary film, he seeks to infuse new meaning into revered classics and provide a forum for social activism. The program is a form of applied drama that draws from traditions of street, radical, and rehabilitative theater and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2014 and a California Arts Council grant in 2019. For more information visit my website and the theater project website.
Mark Manning, Director
Mark Manning is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and director of internationally-acclaimed films, including The Road to Fallujah and The Cost of Silence, nominated for best documentary Sundance 2020. He is currently Founder and CEO of OURVOICE Inc., a media and technology company working to solve hunger in America, and President of ConceptionMedia, a feature documentary film and media campaign production company. Mark is a former offshore oilfield diver, was a co-founder of an international relief agency specializing in humanitarian relief missions in combat zones, and was founder and director of the Clinton Global University Project Dialogues for Peace–an education initiative between universities in Iraq and the United States. Documentaries and news clips he made about the war while living in Fallujah, Iraq have been broadcast in 40 countries and 8 languages and have screened in over 40 film festivals across the globe.
Cris Cazor, Director of photography
Chris Cazor is a film-editor and camera operator specialized in feature films and documentaries. His recent work includes working in Hollywood as a Set Lighting Technician and also in the Award winning feature film The Bet as the main editor (Director Finola Hughes, 2013), reality show Life Matters (Director Christine Fry, 2015) working as the director of photography and co-editor. He is also a music video director, action sports videographer and photographer.
Brent Sumner, Editor
Educated at Brooks Institute of Photography with an emphasis in film, Brent Sumner is a Santa Barbara documentary filmmaker who has worked on numerous productions through his company Studio 8 for nearly twenty years in locations ranging from California to Australia to Russia. His work as a cinematographer, editor, and director has ranged from reality network television to PBS programs to various documentaries based on local interests. Sumner received a Gold Medal at the International Film Awards for cinematography and editing a documentary featuring Robert Duvall. Inspired by a scuba diving accident at Santa Cruz Island nearly a decade ago, Brent turned his camera towards California’s Channel Islands, ultimately creating a three-part PBS series revealing the human history of the islands, West of the West: Tales from California’s Channel Islands. In his most challenging but rewarding endeavor to date, Sumner edited a feature documentary featuring James Cameron and David Attenborough recounting the life of Mike deGruy, famed Marine biologist and filmmaker. Opening the Santa Barbara Film Festival in 2019, Diving Deep: The Life and Times of Mike deGruy was well received by critics, with Sumner recognized by the Hollywood Reporter. “The tightly paced doc (editing by Brent Sumner) covers a good deal of ground in a swift 80 minutes.” Now distributed by Gravitas Ventures and playing on Apple TV.
Devin Tanchum, Editor
Devin Tanchum is a film editor and writer from Portland, Oregon by way of New York City, Los Angeles, and Johannesburg, South Africa. He edited The Russian Woodpecker, directed by Chad Gracia, which won the Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. He has worked with master documentary filmmakers like John W. Walter, Alan Berliner, and Jehane Noujaim. His work has appeared on PBS, AmazonPrime, Vice, GQ.com, and Vogue.com. As a writer, Devin’s fiction and poetry has been published in The Rattling Wall and Zero Ducats.
Karen Everett, Story Supervisor
Karen Everett is one of the world’s leading documentary story consultants, as well as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Founder of New Doc Editing, LLC, she has helped hundreds of filmmakers structure transformational documentaries for PBS, HBO, Sundance and other top film festivals. Her business New Doc Editing provides directors with talented documentary editors, as well as story consultants. Karen story consulted on The Russian Woodpecker, which won the Grand Jury World Cinema Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. Guiding filmmakers to create solution-oriented documentaries that better the human condition, she was also the story consultant on the inspiring, Emmy-nominated documentary 50 Children (2013, directed by Steven Pressman) and the Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here (2013, directed by Tiffany Shlain). Karen taught for 18 years at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, named the #1-ranked documentary program in America by Documentary Magazine. Author of the book Documentary Editing, she has directed and produced six of her own documentaries, including the award-winning PBS biography I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs and American Visionary: The Story of Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Devon Block-Funkhouser, Associate Producer
Devon Block-Funkhouser is an associate producer on the film and is involved with various aspects of the research, production, and impact for The Odyssey Project. She has worked with the director on other films, such as The Cost of Silence, and OURVOICE Inc. projects. She received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and is planning on obtaining her master’s degree from Duke University.
Zachary Price, Ph.D., Researcher and Associate Producer
Zachary Price completed his doctorate at UCSB in Theater Studies and is currently an Assistant Researcher in the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Price has worked in film development at Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, in television production for Law & Order, literary theatre management, and has had plays produced in spaces such as H.E.R.E. Arts Center, 651 Arts, Samuel French Off-off Broadway Short Play Festival, New School University, New Professional Theatre, and Dramatists Guild where he was a Playwriting Fellow. Price’s scholarly writing has appeared in Theatre Topics, Journal of Asian American Studies, and he is co-author of the Bunche Center’s 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report: Making Sense of the Disconnect. Price has been involved with The Odyssey Project since its inception working as a collaborator in numerous capacities including fight choreographer, movement coach, researcher, assistant director, associate producer, mentor, and community activist.
Our Supporters
Special thanks to the community and our supporters who enable us to serve.
Get Involved
Donate
The Odyssey Project is a fiscally sponsored project of the International Documentary Association (IDA), 501(c) (3) nonprofit arts organization. Contributions are payable to IDA and are tax deductible as allowed by law.
To donate via check please make checks payable to: The IDA / Memo Line: TOP # 4701/Criminal Defense
Address to send checks:
IDA, Attention: Fiscal Sponsorship 3470 Wilshire Blvd.
Suite 980
Los Angeles, CA 90010
For online donations please click Donate button below.
Contact
Michael Morgan
Executive Producer
mmorganvoice@gmail.com
Mark Manning
Director
Mark@conceptionmedia.net
Form