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.

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.

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 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.