Bo Legs

Marvin Arrington, Sr. is one of Atlanta’s most significant political leaders yet one of its least recognized. Born in Atlanta, then a segregated, provincial town of the Deep South Arrington grew up to help galvanize the city of his birth into the international, cosmopolitan metropolis that it is today. This documentary takes viewers on the journey of one man’s love for a city and his visionary work for its eventual transformation. Battling through the blows of racism and meshing with political opponents over the years Marvin “Bo Legs” Arrington not only found his way but made his mark in civic duty and social justice. By telling his story this film tells the story of Atlanta. The people who worked with Arrington and knew him best helps narrate this seminal figure’s storied impact in public service to a modern Atlanta community. No other person’s biography parallels so harmoniously with the successful growth of the city of Atlanta than Marvin Arrington, Sr.

High On Heels

High heels are an experience for women. Today, heels have come to represent many things for many women like beauty, sexuality, sophistication, empowerment, maturity, style, and professionalism. This documentary film explores this dynamic and examines the subtle yet popular accessory both men and women take for granted. An in-depth look into the historical significance of the high-heeled shoe will parallel an in-depth look at the health factors that come with wearing them. As a conversational piece, the symbolism, evolution and lifestyle trend of the high heel are expressed by shoe designers, stylists, dancers, models, fashion bloggers, doctors, and everyday women.

Cuban America

The evolving character and story of a major, urban metropolitan city by an immigrant group. This engrossing documentary film highlights the Cuban-impact of Miami-Dade County in the past 5 decades and conveys the story and reality of the largest Cuban Diaspora in the world by documenting the 50-year-story of the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the Cuban immigrant community based in the Greater Miami region. Voices from a range of Cubans in different ages, classes, professions, races, and generations speak on behalf of their experiences living in the city and the explosion they made on Miami’s sociopolitical life and the on culture of the region itself. Miami as the character of the Cuban-American experience.
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Risky Business

Risky Business: A Look Inside America’s Adult Film Industry, a documentary film Adelin Gasana co-wrote and co-edited, examines the social, psychological, and economic impacts of performing in adult films. Questions are raised and answered in this eye-opening documentary like: what makes people decide to become adult entertainers, how do they go about entering the business, what are their experiences in the business, and how do they deal with career options, finances, and relationships once they exit the business? Porn actors and actresses, agents, directors, and producers all come out to reveal the life and reality of the multi-billion dollar industry. This documentary also examines proposed regulations that would address current industry issues, including workplace health and safety, such as mandatory STD testing and condom use, and job discrimination once performers decide to leave the industry and pursue conventional employment.

Existentialism: The Philosophical Movement

Through the works of philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus one comes across one of the most popular philosophical and intellectual movements of the 20th century. In this documentary film Adelin Gasana explores the deep questions, profound claims, and search for truth that made Existentialism the powerful and popular movement that it came to be.

History Institutionalized

History is defined as a continuous, systematic narrative of recorded past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc., usually written as a chronological account; chronicle. But how exactly is history recorded or taught or passed down from one generation to the next? In this introspective documentary short, Adelin Gasana raises the view of whether history is inherently bias, collectively slanted, a form of propaganda set by powerful elites, or an ideology for a community or country to endorse.

Trauma Intervention Program

Trauma Intervention Program Inc. (TIP), a national non-profit organization was founded in 1985. TIP has 15 affiliates serving over 250 cities across the nation. Each affiliate, citizen volunteers respond to traumatic incidents at the request of police, fire and hospital personnel to support those who are emotionally traumatized. TIP is a group of specially trained volunteers who provide emotional aid and practical support to victims of traumatic events and their families in the first few hours following a tragedy thus making them available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Adelin Gasana produces this short film documenting the ongoing activity of TIP volunteers throughout the city of Pensacola, Florida. These TIP volunteers are called by police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and hospital personnel to assist family members and friends following a natural or unexpected death; victims of violent crime including rape, assault, robbery, or burglary; victims of fire; disoriented or lonely elderly persons; people involved in motor vehicle accidents; people who are distraught and seeking immediate support; and survivors of suicide.

The F Word

In the past few decades the term feminism has been stigmatized on an entire social movement of women focused on women’s rights, empowerment, and advancement in society. How has a movement concentrated on the equality of gender before the law grew to be debased over the years with such crude stereotypes like “angry women”, “radical, ugly women”, “hairy”, “hippie-type-types”, “women with no sense of humor”, “women with negative attitudes”, “women who hate men”, and more? In this documentary independent filmmaker Adelin Gasana explores the history of the U.S. women’s liberation movement through the first, second, and third wave of feminism while also documenting how the term feminism and its movement became maligned over the years. Women studies professors, students, authors, activists, and female political leaders all chime in on this introspective journey in understanding the important and popular, modern-day movement called feminism.

Democracy or Not

Democracy is as ancient as Greece and as modern as the United States of America. With the advent of the Founding Fathers and the framework they built of a constitutional federal republic the United States has grown to be the great success story of democracy in world history. But with the new global era where democracy grew in popularity for developed and developing countries to emulate questions still lie dormant in present-day America of how democratic the country still is. Documentary filmmaker Adelin Gasana set out to find out where the United States stands on its once initial notion of democratic republicanism the thing that grew out of the birth of the nation. Is capitalism and democracy really equivalent? What is the practice and goal of the media as it relates to democracy? How has corporations and economics shifted the debate of democratic governance in the past few decades? This documentary provides theories, assumptions, opinions, facts, perspectives, and viewpoints toward the subject of American democracy in today’s everyday reality.

Dear God

The very popular three letter term “God” signifies a lot of emotion, psychology, history, and perspective among a range of people through various cultures throughout the world. For those who grew up in a specific religious tradition or went on a long, powerful spiritual journey the quest and understanding of God can be a lifelong pursuit and focus. In this documentary short independent filmmaker Adelin Gasana begins such a quest in asking the tough questions like “What is God?” “Where can he or she or even it be found?” “Why is it such an important topic and conversation to have while living?”

Evolutionary

The theory of evolution states that changes in the organic design of living species (plants, animals, organisms, etc.) through controlled random mutations and natural selection in adaptation of various natural environments bears forth new species over time. According to evolutionary theory, life began billions of years ago, when a group of chemicals inadvertently organized themselves into a self-replicating molecule. This tiny molecule gave rise to everything that has ever lived on the planet. Different and more complex organisms grew from this simple beginning through mutation of DNA and natural selection. In this engrossing and expository piece documentary filmmaker Adelin Gasana sits down with a biologist, archaeologist, and philosopher in clearing up simple misunderstandings to Charles Darwin’s scientific theory. One such error Gasana clears up is the formal scientific definition of theory which is contrary from the everyday meaning of the word. In science a “theory” refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence. In everyday usage, “theory” often refers to a hunch or a speculation. When people say, “I have a theory about why that happened,” they are often drawing a conclusion based on fragmentary or inconclusive evidence.

Something Called Beauty

Women’s beauty is an important topic throughout the world. It is lauded with mass appeal in movies, music, advertising, and even sports. It’s used as a device for advertising, marketing, selling products and services to mainstream consumers and small local markets. But what is the underlying reality toward the promise of pulchritude? Social pressures, stigmas, discrimination, personal pitfalls, and fear of gaining weight or getting older all play into effect on a woman’s consciousness and psyche today in terms of being beautiful or not. In this introspective documentary that conveys the personal and sensitive side of modern women’s approaches to beauty Adelin Gasana delivers a portrait for women everywhere. He interviews women of various races, classes, ages, distinctions, and history to come to grips with how beauty for women can be a mild distraction, obsessive passion, dangerous addiction, and empty promise.

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is any belief system or methodology which tries to gain legitimacy by wearing the trappings of science, but fails to abide by the rigorous methodology and standards of evidence that demarcate true science. Although pseudoscience is designed to have the appearance of being scientific, it lacks any of the substance of science particularly through the scientific method. Today’s list of pseudoscience include: ESP, parapsychology, radionics, creation science, homeopathy and more. Adelin Gasana delivers this documentary with a comedic approach in attempting to expose pseudoscience and its workings for mass markets. This film features interviews from professors in the field of varying sciences in critiquing, analyzing, forecasting, and, more importantly, warning the lay public of pseudoscience despite it having adherents, mass appeal, and popular following.

Listening to a Stigma

Jay-Z records the line “Picture me working McDonald’s I’d rather pull a mac on you” in a rap song. “Fear me like you fear God because I bring death” 50 Cent raps. Fabolous writes in a song lyric, “I got a good lawyer I’m gonna squeeze.” Nas raps: “If y’all niggaz really with me get busy load up the semis/Do more than just hold it explode the clip until you empty.” Time and time again rap music throughout its surging history from the ghetto streets through top global entertainment markets has faced the stigma for glorifying violence—where young teens are the biggest market for listeners and consumers. Ever since the rise of gangsta rap music in the late 1980s the sub-genre in the hip hop music industry has grown to immense proportions. In this documentary film Adelin Gasana dives into the gangsta rap music sub-genre with the reality of violence in urban streets, unsettled beefs among groups and individuals, and the consistent fatal deaths of gangster rap musicians by the same kind of violence they endorse in song lyrics. Rap icons like the late Tupac Shakur and the late Notorious B.I.G., old school rappers like Ice-T and the group NWA, and current rap stars like Jay-Z, T.I. and 50 Cent all helped to revolutionize gangsta rap into the popular art form it is. As a result hip hop music has grown to a massive level of entertainment in the world but with a cloud of stigma–the glorification of violence.

Living In Genocide

If genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to annihilate a race or civilization of people where can we place the notion of total war in today’s context? Total war played a major part in conflicts from the French Revolutionary Wars to World War II, but has been replaced in the modern era by cheaper, quicker and more effective policies including guerrilla warfare and the adoption of weapons of mass destruction. Adelin Gasana takes on the question of total war in this educational documentary seeking to understand what modern warfare with technological advancement can mean on the world. He sits down with a political science professor, history professor, and a military instructor to rationalize systematic violence of the 20th and 21st centuries. A montage of despots and leaders of various countries in history make it in this film exposing the dark side of humanity.

Reality Matters

In the United States suicides make up 70% more cases than homicides. For every 100 murders that occur there are 170 people killing themselves. And already a stigma to talk about among family members and close friends the media outlets are coerced to keep away from the subject matter altogether because of suicide contagion, an attempt at emulating an original suicide based on accounts or depictions of the original suicide seen depicted on television and other media outlets. Documentary filmmaker Adelin Gasana documents “the elephant in the room” of what suicide has become in the United States. Counselors, psychologists, philosophers, and even a suicidologist are interviewed to deliver a breadth of information, study, focus, and understanding to this sad, despairing topic.

Positively Negative

For decades now the cigarette industry has been decimated by government regulations, PSAs, public health officials, commercial slogans, and campaigns from all over. So, what was the next direction cigarette companies had to do in advertising and marketing their products to existing consumers and future addicts? How about the movie industry? In this short documentary film piece Adelin Gasana explores the relationship to cigarettes and Hollywood specifically how cigarettes have grown to be an advertising tool and subliminal marketing scheme actors and actresses use as a form of product placement in their movies. Outside of the script and not even driven into the storyline of a film, cigarettes, nonetheless, has found their way into the mainstream with the advent of popular, blockbuster commercial movies for several years now.

Dying’s Easy

With today’s rising advancement in technology and a whole new generation growing up on digital platforms newspapers appear to be on its way out–dying a slow death. Small to large newspaper companies have downsized considerably in the past two decades and the newspaper business altogether have lost serious revenue. In sitting down with college professors, current and former newspaper journalists, and college journalism students independent filmmaker Adelin Gasana brings up the discussion of the reality of where the newspaper medium will be in the near future, the types of evolution newspapers will need to be make for its survivability in an ubiquitous digital world, how the anticipated death of newspapers will change approaches and outlooks on news gathering, journalism and information and even how a new generation of people simply aren’t readers like the previous.

Money Talks

In a corporate capitalist society money represents not just competition, luxury, convenience, opportunity but even mere survival. As a result money becomes the topic one can’t choose to ignore nor marginalize. Adelin Gasana sets out in this documentary and raises the value and importance of money in society with his peer group and teachers in explaining what money represents and the proper approaching in thinking about. Far from being a motivational piece on how to accumulate wealth instead Gasana conveys in this film the challenges in understanding money in an ever complex world while highlighting the history of money in the United States and how that continues to shape its citizens both personally and professionally.