THE PROJECT
Jamaica Plain Spoken--a documentary film exploring American community through the microcosm of one "blue" town in Massachusetts.

Aida Lopez is a seventy-eight year old Cuban woman. She pins up photos of George and Laura Bush in her store: La Casa De Regalos. Horace Small, an African American, is the director of The Union of Minority Neighborhoods. He describes himself as a 'brain-damaged lefty' who comes from a family of Republicans and remarks, “I've been arrested forty-four times for the things I believe in.”  Ryan and Jeremy met as teenagers in evangelical-steeped rural Arkansas.  After dating for several years, the couple relocated to Boston to pursue dreams of writing and politics, and found success in Boston's gay arts community.  The Reverend Elizabeth Myer Bolton is the pastor of Hope Church.  Inspired by a “broken heart,” she began a life-long pursuit in search of “something more powerful than sadness.” She reminds us that “no one, not even Hitler, is outside of God's grace.”  What these people have in common is that they live in Jamaica Plain.

JP is a unique Boston community known for its liberal politics, and its diverse population. The residents of JP come from a variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic status. JAMAICA PLAIN SPOKEN: Un-Gated Community In T?he 21st Century explores the lives of these “ordinary” people and how they came to live in this community?but more importantly, why they choose to stay.

OVERVIEW
The idea for the film began two and one half years ago as a response to the filmmakers’ frustration with the impoverished representation of “ordinary” Americans in mainstream media. Inspired by the diversity of people they encountered everyday, from the cheerful Italian barber to the enigmatic performance artist identical triplets, they set out to catalogue over 60 interviews of the life and work of these people in their own words. Their hunch was that they would find, in their own backyard, a wealth of stories, opinions, and experiences that lived just beneath the surface of this extraordinary population. They asked hard questions, pursued personal topics, and followed conversational threads that illuminated the uniqueness of their subjects’ stories and interests. They sought to better understand what connects people in this community, as well as what divides them.

They wanted to know, in the final analysis, what it was that made people of all stripes and persuasions feel at home here and want to remain in this persistently “edgy” community.

With this documentary their hope is to pull the viewer into someone else’s world for a moment, jar their preconceived notions about urban dwellers and send them out of the theater educated in some small way.

JamaicaPlainSpoken.com