Story All The Way Down: Recent Episodes
Kent Bye & Wonder Bright
Kent Bye & Wonder Bright use astrology as a framework to analyze stories & describe the quality, character, & context of human experience. They bridge personal & collective tales exploring what it means to be human, one story at a time.
From the Sundance website: On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a team of Ukrainian journalists enter the strategic eastern port city of Mariupol. During the subsequent siege and assault, as bombs fall, inhabitants flee, and access to electricity, food, water, and medicine are severed, the team — the only international journalists left — […]
The post #30 20 Days in Mariupol appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: KOKOMO CITY takes up a seemingly simple mantle — to present the stories of four Black transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia. Shot in striking black and white, the boldness of the facts of these women’s lives and the earthquaking frankness they share complicate this enterprise, colliding the every […]
The post #29 Kokomo City appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: Central Appalachia is a place of mountains and myth. Director Elaine McMillion Sheldon knows this well, calling those mountains home. Coal has had a profound influence on this community’s identity, but Sheldon dares to consider what future stories might look like out of the shadow of coal, now that relationships to […]
The post #28 King Coal appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: Aaju Peter is a force of nature. She is a renowned Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist who defends the human rights of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and a fierce protector of her ancestral lands. She works to bring her colonizers in both Canada and Denmark to justice and deploys her […]
The post #27 Twice Colonized appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: Rae de Leon, a reporter working at The Center for Investigative Reporting, discovers a surprising number of legal cases nationwide that involve women reporting sexual assault to the police, only to be accused of fabricating their allegations. These women are then charged with crimes, sometimes facing years in prison. Victim/Suspect follows […]
The post #26 Victim/Suspect appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: This is the definitive history of New York City’s Meatpacking District, told by the transgender women of color who created its history. The now corporate, flush façade of the neighborhood was plastered over the world of transgender sex workers who lived, worked, loved, and died there. “The Stroll” was where trans […]
The post #25 The Stroll appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: A meticulous dissection of image-making and a mapping of its movement through society, directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck use a mind-boggling array of archival footage to collage this sociological study by tracking the transmogrification of photographic philosophy and technology over human history. Weaving and contrasting some of the most […]
The post #24 Fantastic Machine appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: Born with a disability so rare that no reliable statistics for it exist, filmmaker Ella Glendining wonders if there is anyone who can share the experience of living in a body like hers. This simple question, one which nondisabled people so often take for granted, leads to a journey to not […]
The post #23 Is There Anybody Out There appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From the Sundance website: Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and his wife has since become his caretaker. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory, having […]
The post #22 The Eternal Memory appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: The father of video art and coiner of the term “electronic superhighway,” Nam June Paik was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Born in Japan-occupied Korea, Paik studied as a classical musician before moving to Germany in the 1950s. Forever changed after encountering avant-garde composer John Cage, Paik […]
The post #21 Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl worries about the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestle with both immediate and systemic challenges. As the pandemic takes hold, she reaches across political and social divides to discover innovators who are risking it all to survive on the front lines. The film […]
The post #20 Food and Country appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Within the past decade, dozens of young Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations have disappeared from Montana’s Big Horn County and its surrounding areas. Understandably, grieving Native families who fear the worst press local law enforcement for answers, but their pleas are most often met with silence […]
The post #19 Murder in Big Horn appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Angel Ellis is just trying to do her job. She’s a reporter for Mvskoke Media in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and she wants to give her readers access to all the information relevant to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. But that’s not an easy task, given that Angel and her colleagues believe in truth and […]
The post #18 Bad Press appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: This penetrating coming-of-age personal essay on love and what it means to become human in the context of race explores the memories and experiences of Milisuthando Bongela, who grew up within apartheid without knowing it was happening until it was over. Bongela was born to a loving middle-class Xhosa community in the […]
The post #17 Milisuthando appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Generations of readers have found themselves in a Judy Blume book. Her name alone launches a flood of memories for anyone who’s gripped one of her many paperbacks. For decades, Blume’s radical honesty has comforted and captivated readers — and landed her at the center of controversy for her frankness about puberty […]
The post #16 Judy Blume Forever appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Fashion revolutionary and model turned agent and activist Bethann Hardison knew that Black is beautiful well before the fashion industry acknowledged the truth. From walking runway shows alongside Iman to discovering supermodels like Tyson Beckford and mentoring icons like Naomi Campbell, Hardison has been at the epicenter of major representational shifts in […]
The post #15 Invisible Beauty appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Mati is an aspiring chaplain on track to finish her yearlong residency in the spiritual care department at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She offers emotional support and spiritual care to patients wrestling with uncertainty, trauma, and grief. And she is doing so in 2020 and 2021, the two […]
The post #14 A Still Small Voice appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: A suspenseful look at the lengths people will go to gain freedom, Beyond Utopia follows various individuals as they attempt to flee North Korea, one of the most oppressive places on Earth, a land they grew up believing was a paradise. At the film’s core are a mother desperate to reunite with […]
The post #13 Beyond Utopia appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Brooke Shields, ’80s icon and household name, was a child model before she came to prominence in Louis Malle’s controversial film Pretty Baby at age 12. With a series of provocative Calvin Klein jeans ads and leading roles in 1980s teensploitation hits The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, Shields’ early career was […]
The post #12 Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: The Hite Report, a groundbreaking study of the intimate experiences of women, remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. Its charismatic author, Shere […]
The post #11 The Disappearance of Shere Hite appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: In 1984, Shoko Asahara started a seemingly innocuous yoga school based in Tokyo. By 1995, the group had evolved into a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo, meaning “Supreme Truth,” whose weapon of choice was sarin, an extraordinarily toxic nerve gas first invented by the Nazis during World War II. An unrelenting, in-depth […]
The post #10 Aum: The Cult at the End of the World appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: “The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.” Legendary poet Nikki Giovanni’s revelation is a launching pad to an inspiring exploration of her life and legacy. Through a collision of memories, moments in American history, live readings of her poetry, and impressions of space, Giovanni urges us to imagine […]
The post #9 Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: At age 16, an undersized army brat landed a part as a 12-year-old on a Canadian television show. Confident he could make it in the U.S., he moved into a tiny apartment in the slums of Beverly Hills. Three years later, he was struggling to scrape by and ready to retreat. But […]
The post #8 Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Atlanta-based singer-songwriters Amy Ray and Emily Saliers began performing together in high school before becoming the acclaimed folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. After playing local clubs for years, Indigo Girls and their distinctive vocal harmonies slipped into mainstream consciousness in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a Grammy win and hit song […]
The post #7 It’s Only Life After All appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Ever wondered what the reality of spending months on a spaceship might be like? Not the romanticized, exciting vision of a space mission, but the fundamentals of day-to-day reality: the isolation, confinement, and lack of privacy and social contact. Sounds similar to our pandemic lives, you might think. But in this case, […]
The post #6 The Longest Goodbye appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: Like a quasar burning past the gaslight, director Lisa Cortés’ eye-opening documentary explodes the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Little Richard: I Am Everything shines a clarifying light on the Black, queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, and establishes the genre’s big bang: Richard Wayne Penniman. Testimonials from legendary musicians and […]
The post #5 Little Richard: I Am Everything appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: For two decades, New York City cinephiles had access to a treasure trove of rare and esoteric films through Kim’s Video. Originally run by the enigmatic Yongman Kim out of his dry-cleaning business, his franchise eventually amassed 55,000 rental titles. In 2008, facing a changing industry, Mr. Kim offered to give away […]
The post #4 Kim’s Video appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the […]
The post #3 The Tuba Thieves appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
From Sundance’s website: There are people out there you wish you had known about (and supported) a long time ago. Francine Coeytaux is one of those people. She has spent decades working in public health and focusing on new reproductive technologies, including the development of emergency contraception. With abortion restrictions and bans going into effect, […]
The post #2: Plan C appeared first on Story All The Way Down.
We didn’t set out to make a podcast, but Kent had a press pass for Sundance this year and he invited me to watch as many of the titles as I wanted to.
The post #1 Welcome to Story All the Way Down appeared first on Story All The Way Down.