To be honored with showing this documentary on a landmark fair housing battle to many of the people who do the hard and honorable work of advocating for and enforcing fair housing laws in America was a wonderful gift. It was even more heartwarming that the film was so well received, since this group knows better than anyone about the realities of fair housing struggles.

Tapping the human capital of the nation is what’s at stake in making equitable access to housing a reality for all— along with the benefits that come with inclusive communities: education, job opportunities, municipal services, and political muscle. When America more fully realizes the potential in making this a significant part of our political agenda, the country will benefit enormously— by generating the dynamic energy of millions of citizens whose power is undermined by lack of adequate and inclusive housing opportunity.

Meeting some of the people who are doing this work, even as the country lumbers through a housing crisis of undetermined proportions, makes a person optimistic about our ability to find the will to make housing opportunity a reality, rather than a promise unfulfilled.

In addition, a different kind of memorial was observed this year at the Tribeca Cinema. A documentary film, “Beyond the 11th,” opened, and was simultaneously shown in a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. The film tells how two courageous women from the Boston area, whose husbands died on planes that struck the towers, transformed their pain into a hand that reached out of the ashes and across the world.

Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, two pregnant women living in wealthy suburbs outside Boston, said goodbye to their partners in the morning, five years ago yesterday, and then fell down a dark hole to a new reality. In their new lives, they bore daughters without fathers, were propelled into a uniquely bizarre and tragic community status, and eventually, found each other. Upon meeting, Patti and Susan realized that they connected as almost no one else could with them in the aftermath of September 11th. They also understood that as much as they wanted to move beyond their new ‘9/11 widow’ identity, this was, to a great extent, whom they now had become.

In the period when the two first met, “Beyond the 11th,” describes the Massachusetts women as overwhelmed by the generosity they received. While it doesn’t dwell on their financial situation, the footage shows their homes and living conditions: surroundings most Americans only hope for, even as the hole in each of their families' lives is painful to watch. At the same time, Patti and Susan are drawn to another reality, one for other widows of war, terror, and violence. This is the situation of war widows in Afghanistan, numbering more than 30,000 in Kabul alone.

Their counterparts’ situation was even more desolate than it might be elsewhere, as most women had no means to make an income and no allowance to work outside their own homes and stay within the rules of Afghan society. With children to support, these widows were truly desperate. Susan and Patti learned about their plight just as they began to regard themselves as blessed by all the attention and support they received from their families and the community around them.

Rather than pushing away from their concern, or turning inward to deal with their own troubles alone, the pair chose to help women on the other side of the world, whose plight had eluded most Americans. They asked for support that Susan and Patti were in a unique position to speak up for— from an American public disposed to listen to families of 9/11’s fallen.

The filmmakers show the two women moving from private living room conversations about helping war widows in Kabul to becoming more polished public personas. The crew follows them describing their mission to a police and National Guard gathering and while they appear on various local and national television programs. The film also depicts frank discussions with non-profit partners and supporters, as the pair attempt to define the parameters of their support; they wonder what numbers will actually make a difference to those who receive their help.

The method Patti and Susan decided on was to support, through their organization, a trio of programs already in place in Afghanistan: Care International, Women for Women, and Arzu, which provided in-home agricultural and business support for women and education for girls. The programs, as basic as one that distributed chickens, incubators, and chickenfeed to women who could then sustain small businesses, were already successful, but were serving much smaller numbers than the need required.

To capture the attention of the public and financial supporters, Patti and Susan decided to bicycle the path home that their husbands never made in 2001. On the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the two started at Ground Zero in New York and cycled the 275-mile journey back to Boston, sponsored by contributors and followed by media hungry for a story about people affected by America’s tragedy. The film follows their ride and plays a spontaneous train of thoughts and emotions along the route of the journey as it unfolds. It strengthens the documentary that it relies heavily on following Patti and Susan living with their children and going about their personal challenges, rather than just illustrating set-piece interviews. It gives the film a genuine feeling of observed life experience, rather than retold history on film.

The exciting transformation that takes the film to another level, however, is that it follows the women’s lives farther, as they are drawn to visit Afghanistan, shows the lives of the women who they seek to help, and the life of an endangered international aide worker they befriend, as she confronts another fact of Afghan life, kidnapping.

That the story begins in Massachusetts, on the television sets of beautifully appointed living rooms and travels not only to the World Trade Center, but on to Kabul and back connects it to the ties that bind us all. "Beyond the 11th," the film, makes the physical and emotional leap that connects two women to the world beyond them and also connects the viewer to how much we are a part of the world, whether we choose to see it or not.

The film is a production of Principle Pictures and is directed by Beth Murphy. Contributions to the organization, Beyond the 11th, can be made here.

These are all questions that I field consistently and if you are a prospective media client thinking about budget vs. marketing value, they are questions you’ll be certainly be mulling over. Money doesn’t grow on trees and especially when you first start making media work for you, price seems a daunting barrier to production.

The first thing to think about is the mission of the project. What will this video do? Do you know the specifics, or will it take a bit of discussion? Is it going to be an introduction to your company, or a piece about a particular product? Will it feature your employees as the on-camera talent, or will an actor or actors play the role of host? Will production be in one location or several? How much of a role will graphics or animation play? Will you shoot in a high-end format or inexpensive digital one? Will a soundstage be required?

Answering these questions will help define the production budget and make an estimate much easier to complete. If you have a sense of what the elements will be, you’re halfway there. We can work out the cost by answering a series of questions.

That’s one way to approach media project budgets. Another workable way to define them is to decide in advance what your budget is, then discuss the project in terms of one basic question, “What can we do to achieve our mission within that number? (‘cause let’s face it, most of the time, you already have an idea what the number is, even if you haven’t said it out loud)” This can also yield good results and can sometimes be a better way to focus on the project, rather than throwing out a wish list and having to begin paring back one element at a time.

If you’re going to work with a good production company, one of the benefits to the client should be to take advantage of our experience and ideas. We can suggest ways to approach a project that you might not have encountered, ways that can meet your needs within your budget.

So, that’s a more nuanced answer than you probably wanted, but it’s honestly more helpful than giving out ballpark figures that keep changing as the facts of the production and the mission emerge. If you can find an experienced, creative, effective producer you trust and respect, one of these methods will work well. It’s better than a scattershot Request for Proposal letter to twenty companies— and it builds a collaborative relationship from the beginning of production.

The consultants, of course, are the exclusive and reknowned firm, Greenberg Carville Shrum. Their cache comes mostly from the charisma and notoriety of James Carville, who made the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid,” famous in a documentary about his management of 1992 Clinton campaign, “The War Room.” The firm sells their services internationally to candidates who meet their “Third Way” neo-liberal criteria, candidates from all over the globe when US elections aren’t occupying their efforts.

Nonetheless, Goni fit the profile of the kind of pro-US, liberal capitalist politician who might be viewed as a Democrat in the United States, but who in Bolivia was far to the right of leftist candidates from the majority indigenous population like Evo Morales. In a climate of hard times, Goni would have an uphill fight in the 2002 elections, running well behind another candidate for “change,” a rightist mayor, Manfred Reyes Villa, head of the New Republican Force (NFR).

Boynton had extraordinary access in her production to all the principals in the Goni campaign, having separately approached the candidate and the consultants. She described this as being key to keeping any of the subjects from denying her camera permission to be inside strategy meetings or calls. The film clearly benefited from such comfortable moments when the politician's and consultants' guard is not raised to the implications of being recorded.

Rather than spoil the fun of watching this film unfold, I’ll save the amazing narrative plot of the campaign and historical events for the film audience and concentrate on the way Boynton chose what to cover and how to approach her material. The first choice, what to cover was brilliant. As a neophyte producer/director, Boynton couldn’t have picked a better group to follow to describe the twisted relationship between American-style political campaigning and a Latin American country in the throes of a crisis.

“Our Brand is Crisis” takes its title from a briefing given the candidate early in the 2002 campaign by Jeremy Rosner, the consultant from Greenberg Carville Shrum who heads the Goni team. They seek to "own" and market the country's crisis, the way one would sell any brand. The way that Boynton cuts the film of this briefing and subsequent meetings between the candidate’s people, Goni himself, and the consultants is another basic filmmaking choice that works for the material.

Rather than breaking away from these sessions to provide background or commentary, Boynton lets the participants tell their own story, either in the scenes themselves or in interviews that seem to occur both during and after the campaign. The effect is devastating to the group on the screen. Rosner in particular does himself serious damage, coming across as cold and calculating in his interviews and in meetings where he describes ways they are smearing the right-wing candidate through unsubstantiated whisperings about corruption. Another choice to associate the rightist to the military is made by repeatedly showing a decades-old photograph of Manfred Reyes Villa in an officer’s cap.

Another production choice Boynton made during the campaign was to search out the indigenous campesino marchers who showed up all over the country to protest their exclusion from power in a country made up with a majority indigenous population. After a day of missteps, Boynton and her cameraman finally made a serendipitous meeting with some of the marchers, right around the twilight hour, making for some unforgettable footage that contextualizes the political scheming going on in La Paz while most of the country scratches out a meager living outside the capital.

The film takes advantage of a great bit of history that happens largely off-camera, but that is informed by the story it does capture. The corruption and manipulations of the political insiders finally pale by comparison to the broader history taking place in the streets of La Paz, but the story we see on-screen informs the audience's understanding of the changes taking place there.

See this film, if you can find it. When you do, notice how a filmmaker takes a seemingly small story and raises it to indicate the global implications it raises by making good choices and following them as the unbelievable occurs.