Director Grace Lee has been filming AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS, a feature documentary about legendary Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs over the past decade. They’re trying to raise funds to complete the film this year. As Grace is now 96, they want her to be part of the film’s release plan. Here’s more about the documentary film:

Grace Lee Boggs has dedicated her life to the next American Revolution. Born to Chinese immigrants in 1915, she earned a PhD in philosophy at age 25 before committing herself to a life of ideas, action, and the promise of change and social justice from within the African-American community. Moving to Detroit in the 1950s and marrying African-American autoworker/activist James Boggs, she saw that Detroit embodied both the failures and possibilities of the American dream, and was thus an enormously fertile place to work. At 96, Grace continues to engage audiences everywhere in a process of re-imagination, conversation and action — reminding us that revolution is not only possible and necessary, but already happening.
Although Grace’s biography is part of our story, this is not a traditional biopic or historical film. This story is about how a visionary thinker and doer grapples with the looming questions confronting humanity and sustains her commitment to that work. The driving narrative transports Grace through the major social movements of the last century — from labor to civil rights, from Black Power to feminism, identity politics and beyond — and shows how she emerged with a philosophy that is almost radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression but an ongoing, evolving series of living conversations. It is about the willingness to shift tactics, reflect upon and embrace contradictions. “Revolution,” Grace says, “is about the ability to change yourself to change the world.”

In a world plagued by seemingly endless wars, environmental disasters, rampant consumerism and economic collapse, people everywhere are asking: How can I make a difference? How do we create meaningful change? And how do we sustain ourselves so we can continue evolving our humanity? American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs explores how a lifetime of thinking, advocating, and grassroots action has culminated in powerful approaches to these elusive questions and how Grace’s ideas are inspiring a new generation of young people and activists to rebuild and revitalize their corner of the world, in Detroit.

You can help fund the film here.

Help fund American Revolutionary documentary about Grace Lee Boggs

If you missed the eye-opening film “Last Train Home” on the film festival circuit, you can now watch it online for a limited time. The documentary gives you a whole new perspective of the sacrifices made in China to create products for consumption around the world. Here’s more about the film:

In the opening shots of Last Train Home, as the camera pans over a paved empty lot, then across a sea of people jostling behind barriers and finally into a surging river of humanity, the film plunges the viewer into an extraordinary phenomenon. China’s booming economy depends on the single largest migrant work force in the world: 240 million people who have left their homes and villages to seek work in urban factories.

The scale of this internal migration, and the social turmoil it brings, is never more visible than in the workers’ annual return to their families and villages for Chinese New Year. Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year in the world’s largest human migration. Millions on the move is a testament to the determination of Chinese workers to reconnect with family and tradition. It also exposes a nation under stress from rapid economic development and massive social change.

Among those millions are husband and wife Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin who, 16 years earlier, left their village in Sichuan Province—and left their children in the care of grandparents—to work in the city of Guangzhou, 1,300 miles away. Last Train Home takes viewers on a heart-stopping journey with the Zhangs, a couple who left infant children behind for factory jobs 16 years ago, hoping their wages would lift their children to a better life. Their contact with their children was reduced largely to telephone calls and the annual New Year’s reunion. The Zhangs return to a family growing distant and a daughter longing to leave school for unskilled work. While the great spaces of China, alternately empty or crowded with anxious tides of people, are always present, Last Train Home is most intimately the story of the Zhang family, who are fated to reach for the promise of the new China and discover its wrenching cost. As the Zhangs navigate their new world, the film paints a rich, human portrait of China’s rush to economic development.

Last Train Home on PBS

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