Politicos

““Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” - attributed to Plato

It goes without saying that American politics seem to be in a painfully precarious position right now. Many of us fear for our democracy; and too many of us have become defeatist in the face of surging right-wing defiance. It’s easy for “normie” progressives – folks who don’t work in politics and aren’t terminally online - to feel helpless about getting things back on track. But the ability to fight back has always been in our grasp. We just have to learn how to make it work for us.

Regardless of your political beliefs, if you want to change the system, you first need to understand how it works.  For forty years, that’s what our films have been about.  Now we’re reaching into our archives and shooting fresh footage to help tell a new story – one which can help us understand how we’ve gotten to where we are today and point the way towards a deeper understanding of how American politics affects our future.  This is A FIELD GUIDE TO PRACTICAL POLITICS – a positive, hands-on way of thinking about politics in a negative world.

This new film from veteran political filmmakers Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker, and Paul Stekler will provide some inspiration and optimism to beleaguered progressives looking for actionable steps that will turn things around. Our title says it all: A FIELD GUIDE TO PRACTICAL POLITICS – a series of stirring true stories about how a focus on small victories and mastery of the game of politics can lead to outsize successes.

We’ve been making films about the intersection of American politics and culture since our first documentaries in early 1980’s, Ends of the Earth, in the swamps south of New Orleans and Hands That Picked Cotton in the Mississippi Delta. What followed were four films aired on PBS’s POV series (Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics, Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style, Getting Back to Abnormal, and American Tongues), the Peabody Award winning Vote for Me: Politics in America, the Sundance award winning George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, the series People Like Us: Social Class in America, and others. POLITICOS is a culmination of that work, looking to understand what we’ve filmed about our electoral politics, in a time of worry about the future of democracy, and to figure out a way out of the today’s dysfunction.