THE COMPANY AND THE FILMMAKERS
The Company: Ash Grove Film, LLC
Based out of Los Angeles, California, Ash Grove Film LLC is producing this documentary. Its principals are Jolie Pearl, Jerry Kay and Fred Aronow. It was founded in 2015 with the cooperation of Ash Grove Music, Inc., a non-profit foundation whose mission was to continue the legacy of the original Ash Grove club through concerts, lectures, community performances, support for young artists and other initiatives that support roots and folk music and related arts in the Los Angeles area. In 2019 Ash Grove Music, Inc. was folded into the operations of a sister-organization, GetLit, where that work continues.
Director / Producer : Fred Aronow
A veteran filmmaker who has worked in Los Angeles for the last 40 years, he started in New York working with Shoshoni Productions working on the groundbreaking PBS series Vanishing Wilderness. As part of the Wintersoldier Collective he worked on the production and international release of the feature documentary Winter Soldier, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Critic’s Week. He followed that up with work on the PBS Special Black Coal, Red Power; the made-for-PBS feature A Secret Space, and the independent Guyanese feature Aggro, Seizeman, before moving to the west Coast. His work since that time has continued his focus on issues of justice, human dignity, ecology, access to healthcare and the many issues that negatively and positively affect the daily lives of people around the world.
Producer : Jed Riffe
Jed has served as producer on more than 30 documentary projects seen internationally and nationally including 15+ programs seen on PBS. They span subjects ranging from anthropology to politics and cultural justice. They have garnered 40 National and International Film Festival Awards and an Emmy nomination. In these productions he has developed the techniques and understanding to work with the masses of archival material that are frequently part of documentaries that require authenticated visual images from the past.
Recognizing the difficulty of producing independent documentaries, he has also been able to find paths to funding, completion and releasing the projects he considers worthwhile. This part of his activity has been recognized by the award of the Gerbode Fellowship for Non-Profit Management.
Jed was selected as a 2009 Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee and a Sundance Fellow and he is a Sundance Alumni.
Editor : Chris Jones
Chris is a documentarian concerned with themes of environmental and social justice. His short-documentaries Trash, Manufactured and Junk raise global awareness about the impact of plastic polluting our oceans. Since completing a post-production internship on Ken Burns’ Country Music series, Chris has served as assistant editor to Academy Award-winning documentarian Freida Lee Mock on her features Ruth and The Choir and Conductor, co-editor alongside Academy Award-winning director Terry Sanders on his feature 9th Circuit Cowboy, and associate editor on Suzanne Joe Kai’s Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong Torres. In 2019 he co-wrote and edited Wake Up: Stories from the Frontlines of Suicide Prevention. His latest project, Bad Faith, tracks the rise of Christian Nationalism in American politics.
An appreciation of those on whose shoulders we stand
This project would not exist without the foresight of the first team that started collecting interviews and archival material in 2008: Jerry Kay, Aiyanna Elliott, and Ed Pearl. And a second crew with Spencer Showalter and Samuel Curtis, brought the project back into production in 2014 working with Fred Aronow.