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Local Filmmaker Launches Web Series: Inspired Citizens Revitalizing 'We the People'

Voices of Hope Productions tells stories about ordinary people transforming their communities.

Lori Ersolmaz tells stories. Hopeful, engaging, inspiring stories about citizens who see problems in their communities, and with an irreverent spirit and without permission, do something about it.

This documentary filmmaker and teacher from Rumson uses her camera to tell stories about environmental issues, social justice, corporate responsibility and education. Her subjects are regular people, propelled to action by a problem they grew tired of witnessing.

Anchored in the Two River area, Ersolmaz has had a colorful career in marketing and communications for Fortune 500 companies and now works with nonprofit organizations. She also teaches graphic design to college students at Rider University and filmmaking and media literacy to youth in places like Asbury Park, Newark and Matawan. But chief among her passions is visual storytelling. Her production company, Voices of Hope, won a 2011 National Media Literate Award. Previous honorees include Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers.

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Through Voices of Hope, Ersolmaz documented a rebel Trenton artist in his work to transform his city with positive images, and in Asbury Park she chronicled Hope Academy Charter School and its founder’s dream to give student’s a high quality, community minded education. Whether she’s filming about prison reform or natural gas drilling, her stories and subjects have a singular message – voting alone is not citizenship.

“Citizens need to realize they are capable of coming together to deliberate, set their own agendas and devise solutions to problems in their communities,” she said. A democracy, as Ersolmaz puts it, is messy work done by the people, making change from the bottom up.

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Now Ersolmaz is set to launch her latest work, Engaging People Series: Citizens Revitalizing Democracy, partly inspired by Superstorm Sandy.

In November, when New Jersey was still reeling from the storm, Ersolmaz was feeling caught – so much destruction everywhere. “A week after the storm I was saying to myself, ‘How can I help? What can I do?’ And then I thought, ‘What do you mean, What can you do? This IS what you do.’”

With her camera she traveled from Union Beach to Lavallette. What she found was, at the same time Sandy leveled homes and businesses, livelihoods and spirits, she also pushed down obstacles separating neighbors from each other and citizens from public work. She found neighbors meeting for the first time in public spaces and others had driven cross-country by compassion to help.

One of her subjects, nicknamed Circus Maximus, is a cook by trade. He and his wife watched the events unfold from their home in Seattle and hopped on a plane to Philly where they rented a U-Haul truck which they transformed into the U-Hungry Café where they served up hot meals and entertainment to displaced people and volunteers in Union Beach.

Ersolmaz asked Circus, “Why don’t more people get involved in helping?”

With a red clown nose and all seriousness, he replied, “Because there are professional organizations and that’s all people know. They start to think, ‘Ok well, I don’t need to actually do anything,’” he said. “It sort of creates a barrier between ordinary people doing what’s right.”

Ersolmaz is driven by the notion that these kinds of good works are going unseen, ignored by mass media.

The problem now, as she sees it: too much gridlock, too much negativity. Ordinary citizens weighed down by the misconception, ‘What I do isn’t going to make a difference.’

Ersolmaz is emphatic, her voiced raised, “I’m here to say people are doing great public works together and it does make a difference.”

Her goal with the Engaging People Series is to effect change by showing citizens empowered in their communities, in ways as unique as they are – artists, clowns, civil servants, hippies, executives.  She hopes that her films will spark citizens to become permanently engaged, even after a disaster.

“Disasters bring out a different, highly compassionate side of civic participation,” she said.  “If people can come together in the aftermath of a disaster, they can do it on a regular basis.”

That’s what happened when Circus Maximus headed home after Thanksgiving. He handed off the food truck to locals.

“Definitely, the food truck gave each of the people involved a feeling of being in charge and doing something valuable with their lives. Everyone who they served loved it and were happy to see them,” she said.

Sandy provided endless stories to tell about people doing good, but Ersolmaz isn’t just interested in disaster’s ability to bring people together. She wants to reframe citizenship in terms of relationships. They’re messy and hard, but they’re what give our lives and communities meaning. They require the people with something at stake to put their needs on the table to work for a solution.

“We don’t have to be friends. It’s about coming together to do public work,” she said. “It builds up our civic fiber.”

So now she’s turning her lens to civil servants like Andy Schrank and his team of the Fair Haven Fire Department. “The members don't all agree on issues having to do with the fire company, but they put their differences aside when there's an emergency,” she said. “They all pull together.  We can learn from that.”

To tell the story of a fire company in a tiny town is important to Ersolmaz because the struggles are universal. Giving voice to those struggles is her passion, but it is not a profitable commercial enterprise. Her work on the series is entirely self-funded.

That’s why she’s set her sites on Looking@Democracy, a national digital media contest to answer the question, “How can we work together to strengthen our democracy?” The films will be judged by a panel in a variety of categories. From May 6-16 you can view and vote for her three minute film submission in the People’s Choice category on the Looking@Democracy web site.

Ersolmaz hopes the $100,000 in prizes and national exposure could give her the opportunity to tell more stories about citizens, engaged and empowered. With the money she would take the Engaging People Series on the road for public screenings and dialogue.

“I want to provide examples and role models of civic engagement and encourage other people to participate in our democracy,” she said.

But prize or no prize you, will still find Ersolmaz telling stories to inspire change.

“Nothing is going to prevent me from doing this.”

To vote, click here.

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