Størmerlige Films

08/02/2024

is pleased to announce that LOOKING FOR LARRY (working title) is being pulled out of turnaround and returned to active Development. An examination of the crisis of su***de among veterans and active duty service personnel, through the lens of one family’s experience coming to terms — and not — with the loss of one of its own in the horrors of Vietnam. It’s a discussion of memory as not just lived, but recurring, experience, of the myths families tell themselves to create comfortable narratives, and the hidden, but potent pain of one of the biggest taboos among military families.

***depreventionawareness

05/11/2022

We’re very happy to re-enter the filmmaking world. Our production slate has both slimmed and expanded, as THE GOOD AMERICANS has become a broader storytelling project, with one feature film (WITH NOTHING BUT OUR COURAGE) and a series of feature-length, standalone documentaries that spotlight the lives of loyalist women, along with a number of shorts and micros to expand and explore our understanding of their experience and legacies.

Currently, our feature lineup includes projects that spotlight Mary Jones (Thoreau’s grandmother), Nancy Dixon (an enslaved woman from Williamsburg who ended up in The Bahamas), and Mary Brant (a Mohawk woman from New York who became a loyalist hero).

All projects are back in Development after a lengthy period of turnaround. And we are currently looking to hire Production staff.

04/22/2021

With masks in place, and fully vaccinated, a small part of the Størmerlige Films team is venturing out again in support of , a project that includes several films restored to Development. Next week we are headed to Concord, Massachusetts, to more deeply explore its Loyalist connections -- and the direct links between them, competing ideas of liberty, and the lives of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

04/22/2021

Hope Town is a special place on the Abaco Islands and Elbow Cay in The Bahamas. It's where our search for Nancy Dixon begins, as a joint project of and .

Nancy entered into the historical record just where white truths would place her -- as a Black woman who stole her freedom from newspaper printer John Dixon of Williamsburg, Virginia (next time you walk by The Sign of the Rhinoceros at CW, think of Nancy). At the end of 1780, just after Benedict Arnold's British and Loyalist army landed in Virginia, 27-year-old Nancy took her 3-year-old daughter to join them, beginning an odyssey that would take her to New York City for several years before the evacuations of 1783.

On August 21, 1783, she and her daughter boarded "The Nautilus" and set sail for Abaco with 35 other formerly enslaved men and women. Four years later, she would encounter a familiar face -- John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, last royal governor of Virginia and new royal governor of The Bahamas, there to write another chapter in his unlikely story of preserving the freedom of free Blacks from those who would seek to return to them to chains.

Nancy's story is of the people of The Bahamas who created a nation of their own, today governed by their descendants as a free and independent country. Our project is to connect the dots from Nancy's last walk down Duke of Gloucester Street to the world she made in places such as Hope Town and Nassau.

PHOTO CREDIT: The Antiquities, Monuments & Museum Corporation (taken from Elbow Reef Lighthouse)

03/26/2021

"You need to be invested in these stories. You need to care about these characters in order to really want to follow the story. That’s the biggest thing in good storytelling, whether it’s fictional or real-life storytelling: You want to make sure that your audience cares.” — Amber Marshall

There’s a lot we all know about Amber. She’s an incredible actor and producer, knows a thing or two about horses, and gives the best weather reports in the entire High River area. But what you might *not* know is that so much of that revolves around a central theme — she is an expert storyteller, from the substance to the craft. Graduate students at Johns Hopkins University were recently treated to a discussion with Amber about her approach to storytelling structure and content, where it is and where it’s going, facilitated by our Executive Producer, who teaches the course. One thing became clear to everyone involved: Amber knows how, through the right kind of storytelling, to make 2 + 2 = 5 for audiences and creators alike.

09/28/2020

"We carry our past with us. We are our history." -- James Baldwin

Join us for the stories that deserve to be told, the voices that need to be heard, in Season 1 of WE ARE OUR HISTORY with Executive Producer Noelle Renée Bercy, Madison Lawlor, Brittany Ishibashi, Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Jessica Matten, Eden Espinosa, Nathaniel Arcand, and Alaine Chartrand, at Plimoth Plantation, Site Traditionnel Huron, Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, National Chavez Center, Whitney Plantation, Manzanar National Historic Site, Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation, Royall House & Slave Quarters, New Echota, Iolani Palace, Village historique de Val-Jalbert, St Simons African American Heritage Coalition.

09/21/2020

We remember Justice Ginsburg as a leader who always found a path towards change, and as someone who enacted that change through consistency and patience. A fervent supporter of gender equity, we can keep in mind her call for representation in all aspects of our work today and always.

08/25/2020

First and foremost, we're a studio about honest, forthright portrayals of the past, particularly on the screen. Our producers, directors, and writers have both Emmy awards and PhDs, so that we can identify, develop, and produce stories that audiences need to hear, to understand how "then" became "now." That's why we're especially appreciative of Turner Classic Movies' new intro to GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). Dr. Jacqueline Stewart masterfully presents its complexities and challenges, while acknowledging its achievements. But she never allows us to lose sight of the racial politics that went into its production and racial injustice that shaped its subject, its making, and the ways it is watched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DF2FKRToiQ

TCM Host and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart introduces Gone with the Wind, expressing why this 1939 epic drama should be viewed in its original form, contex...

08/07/2020

back again with our week in the studio!

This week we talked with New Echota, , Pompey Museum, and

We also want to congratulate an incredible summer with us!


Editing: .films
Manzanar Photo: Library is Congress
Song: 235 Are You Alive by Michael Shynes

07/31/2020

Our new weekly update video from the team at Størmerlige Films! Do you know the site Alli is talking about? It’s the latest — and last — addition to Season 1 of WHO ARE YOU WITH?

06/05/2020

05/25/2020

A new digital series, coming soon, from us and HRT Channel. Led by Amber Marshall, with Don Wildman, to take us across North America and the Caribbean to show us the people and places who not only preserve the past, but who also keep it alive a vital force for positive change in our communities.

And you can join in. Visit www.future4thepast.org to tell us who you're with, what place you want to ensure stays open and vital for others, and we'll feature it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwhpHpILak

STAY TUNED FOR THE NEW WEB SERIES, COMING SOON! THANKS TO Amber Marshall Tourism Nova Scotia Plimoth Plantation Canadian Tourism Commission Travel Manitoba T...

05/24/2020

The incredible Jessica Matten will be joining ’s WHO ARE YOU WITH? to highlight Indigenous heritage sites that are acting as forces for good in our communities. The past isn’t dead. It isn’t past. History is real. History is now.

05/12/2020

We are thrilled to welcome Ms. Amanda Magen, from the University of Virginia, as our Summer 2020 intern. She will work with our Production team on everything from development to distribution. But don't take our word for it; get to know her in her own words.

“Hello! My name is Amanda Magen and I am about to begin my second year as an undergraduate at UVA. I live outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and visiting all the historic sites first kindled my interest in history, particularly the American Revolution. I am very excited to work with Størmerlige Films this summer. This internship will be a wonderful opportunity for me to learn about historical storytelling through the medium of film and to understand what goes into producing and advertising these projects.”

04/03/2020

For every large museum or heritage site that we hear is struggling, there are hundreds, even thousands, of smaller efforts across the United States and Canada that are facing challenging, even dire, futures. We're so pleased to have joined with the Newport Historical Society and heritage community to issue this call of support to those sites, and the tens of thousands of people they employ, to preserve and project our past into an uncertain future. They are not alone.

03/19/2020

Even though our production parents -- Disney and Nat Geo -- have halted all production and trimmed down much development, and we at Størmerlige Films have pulled all connected and independent productions back into development (WITH NOTHING BUT OUR COURAGE, GASPEE DAYS, etc.), we're doing so with a focus on our mission to tell stories that engage, inform, and provoke. But we also know that we have an obligation to our friends, family, and neighbors in a global community reeling from a seemingly ceaseless attack by an unknown enemy.

That is why we are doing all we can to support those who work every day to preserve and project our shared histories with , a campaign to raise the visibility of museums and heritage sites that need help in an time of social distancing and isolation. We are also donating our time and other resources in a digital storytelling project that increases the awareness of these special places and the stories they have to tell, with a focus on the loyalists of the American Revolution -- in line with our core feature project, THE GOOD AMERICANS, narrated by Amber Marshall. Most loyalists -- young and old, men and women, white and black, rich and poor -- were caught in the whirlwind of a conflict they never asked for, and forced to make decisions about how to make their way in a world with no more certainties, in new places, to create new communities and new ways of understanding words like community and country. There are lessons there for us all.

So please join us by sharing your loyalist stories -- of ancestors, places, treasures, and legends. Help us boost the awareness of a shared humanity in which, as many loyalists believed, the difference of political opinion were not differences of principle, and where being right or wrong about political ideas was no shield against the common enemies of us all: sickness, poverty, and fear. Let's together shed light into those darkest of corners.