Distribution & Outreach

DISTRIBUTION

WETA, the Washington DC public television station, has expressed an interest in being the presenting station for a national PBS broadcast once the film is completed (see WETA and PBS letters).

Theatrical distributors Zeitgeist Films, First Run Features (distributor of my previous feature documentary, Kaddish) and Seventh Art Releasing have each expressed eager interest in the film. 

OUTREACH

Once completed, in addition to a potential theatrical run and a PBS broadcast, we look forward to utilizing the film to conduct extensive outreach.

The audiences we believe can be reached with this film are: Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Muslims, Hindus, interfaith groups and the churches, mosques, temples and synagogues affiliated with them; civil rights organizations, human rights organizations, peace activist organizations, African-American churches, university religion and history departments, college student centers, hillels, JCCs, religious bookstores, libraries, community centers, the Alabama State government, the City of Selma’s Mayor’s Office and the United States Congress.

We also want to make every attempt to get this film shown at many of the same venues where Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was shown, as well as at Islamic cultural centers, and to encourage meaningful interfaith dialogue.  In short, we want this film to make a difference. 

To that end we have already had discussions on outreach with Working Films, a North Carolina-based company that specializes in helping independent films reach as wide an audience as possible.  They have done this with enormous success with the films, Two Towns of Jaspar, about the brutal murder of a black man in Wyoming, and Trembling Before G-d, about gay Orthodox Jews.  Among some of the groups we plan to work with are the King Center, the Jewish Progressive Alliance, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Center for Jewish History, the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the National Council of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, the National Conference for Community and Justice, the American Sufi Muslim Organization, the Arab Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Public Justice.

Among the topics that events can be centered around are: 

• What ever happened to the religious left?

• Blacks and Jews in the civil rights movement

• Clergy involvement in politics

• The moral obligation of the citizen

• The efficacy and challenge of interreligious dialogue

• The Second Vatican Council—a blueprint for interfaith relations?

• Is proselytizing appropriate in multi-faith America?

• The problem of religious and ethnic triumphalism

We believe deeply that by presenting the ideas, values and the humanity of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Praying With My Legs is bound to leave a powerful imprint, perhaps even a life-changing one on a wide and disparate audience.

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