Award-winning Film maker
Everyone knows the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child." But few know Michael Meade's apt inversion: "It takes the struggles of youth to raise a village." Our functioning as a community can best be measured by how effective we are in offering our young people growthful rites of passage into adulthood - effective challenges that can positively define them as newly emergent adults. It's our job as elders to hold and contain the energy of young people during their time of furious transition. The implications of not doing so already surround us in the myriad forms of dysfunctional teen behavior. What can we do to repair this breech in the generational chain? A long-time student of these issues, Frederick Marx has some inspiring ideas.
Frederick Marx is an internationally acclaimed, Oscar and Emmy nominated director/writer with 35 years in the film business. He was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year for 1994, a 1995 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. His film HOOP DREAMS played in hundreds of theatres nationwide after winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first documentary ever chosen to close the New York Film Festival. It was on over 100 "Ten Best" lists nationwide and was named Best Film of the Year by critics Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Gene Shalit, and Ken Turran and by the Chicago Film Critics Association. Ebert also named it Best Film of the Decade. It is one of the highest grossing non-musical documentaries in United States history.
