GEM Film Response to Waiting for Superman Premiere Thursday Gets More Space, Another Screening on May 21

The response to our film, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, has been overwhelming, with requests coming in from all over the nation and Canada too. My job is to process the incoming emails. Some of the statements from educators and parents thanking us for making this film have been very moving - I will share a bunch at some point. What is clear is that the attack on public education, teachers and their unions, with Waiting for Superman piling on, has resonated with people —as has the fact that we undertook this project (we gave up Waiting for Michael Moore) on our own with no finances and little film making experience.

We've been mailing out DVDs to reviewers. Education reporter Beatriz Rey in Brazil who writes for their equivalent of Education Week wrote an excellent review of the film on her blog.  She has some legitimate criticisms which we agree with - but we just couldn't flesh out every aspect of the debate, keep the film around an hour and finish in a reasonable time. We hope to do follow-up films, as we are now hooked.

The always amazing Susan Ohanian, who just may be the first person to take on the ed deformers way back, saw an early version of the film and wrote: I've seen the film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman and I recommend it.


Hundreds of seats added
The original 500 seats were booking up so fast, Riverside Church (490 Riverside Drive & 122 St.- entrance on Cleremont Ave.) added another hundred. By Friday afternoon when we did a walk-through we were well over 500. Then they moved us upstairs to a bigger space that holds 800.

So if you were worried about getting a seat, there is still time. Here is the announcement GEM posted on Facebook:

We are looking forward to seeing you on May 19th at the première of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman at Riverside Church. In order to guarantee a seat, please make a reservation for yourself and the others in your party by going to this link:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGJXN2V2NHBnVk1GOVFVYnZfSnp4cFE6MQ

Another screening on May 21
If you can't the premiere, we will have 3 videographers taping. But you can also see the movie next Saturday night, May 21, at 7pm at a Socialist Party screening on the Lower East Side. The post screening panel will include GEM's Julie Cavanagh, Sam Anderson of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, the UFT's Leo Casey and Stanley Aronowitz of the CUNY Grad Center. All but Aronowitz are in the film.