First begun in 2006, WAKE (SUBIC) completes the documentary diptych, FOR EXAMPLE, THE PHILIPPINES, the first part of which, VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK) was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US military bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, both films are an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.

An investigation into the ecological disaster caused by a US military base on the Philippines – and its victims, their world. A humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist, a cinematic prose poem.

A visual meditation on the progressive history of the United States as seen through cemeteries, historic plaques and markers. Inspired by Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States".

For nearly two decades, John Gianvito has been carving out a unique space in American cinema with passion projects of expansive shape and political ambition, including The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, a documentary-fiction inquiry into the human toll of the Gulf War, and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a becalmed yet radical Howard Zinn–inspired reflection on American progressivism. In his new film, Gianvito meditates on a particular moment in early 20th-century history: when Helen Keller began speaking out passionately on behalf of progressive causes. Beginning in 1913, when, at age 32, Keller gave her first public talk before a general audience, Her Socialist Smile is constructed of onscreen text taken from Keller’s speeches, impressionistic images of nature, and newly recorded voiceover by poet Carolyn Forché. The film is a rousing reminder that Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage was philosophically inseparable from her battles for the rights of the disabled.

A cri de coeur against Iraq War I from writer-director John Gianvito (Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind).