Stories have incredible power to shape us. From the bedtime tales we tell our children to the latest installments of multi-billion-dollar film franchises, compelling characters and skillful storytelling grab our attention like nothing else.
Less enrapturing—at least for most of us!—are the economic charts and jargon-laden phrases of academia. Yet too often that’s exactly how the case for freedom is made: with statistics rather than stories. Thankfully, there are some remarkably talented folks advancing the ideas of a free society through comedy sketches, short films, documentaries, and feature-length movies.
On the most recent episode of Giving Ventures, Peter is joined by guests from a trio of groups whose visual storytelling is capturing audiences with the message of freedom. First, Nick Reid and Lana Link from the Moving Picture Institute describe how their incubator and workshop programs cultivate the talents of young creatives with stories about human freedom. Then, Free the People president Matt Kibbe considers the power of video content to reach America’s young and “liberty curious.” Finally, Jim Tusty of Sky Films draws on his extensive career to explain how compelling documentaries can persuade without telling the audience what to think.
Cultivating Creative Talent
The Moving Picture Institute isn’t just producing top-notch films that have critics and audiences raving; it’s also paving the way for the next generation of upcoming filmmakers. From college students just getting their foot in the door of the entertainment industry to established professionals in Hollywood, MPI has created an extensive network of talents.
For those just starting out, MPI’s competitive Hollywood Career Launch Program offers paid internship experience on a film set where budding filmmakers can experience the movie-making process up close as part of a production company team. “From the earliest stages of wanting to be in entertainment, we are helping people along,” Lana explains.
Those who participate in MPI’s Short Film Lab get training and mentorship in screenwriting and directing, and the Documentary Storytelling Workshops help movie makers take their nonfiction visual storytelling to the next level with an emphasis on character development and cultivation of story arcs.
MPI’s narrative and documentary work doesn’t preach or propagandize, but there is a unifying message. As Nick put it, “Our films really should be uniting people around the central idea of freedom.” Take one of MPI’s latest successes, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, which tells the true story of pinball wizard Roger Sharpe who helped overturn New York City’s ban on pinball in 1976. Called one of the best films of 2023 by the New Yorker, Pinball was produced by MPI and written and directed by the Bragg Brothers, who came up through MPI’s programs.
Reaching the Liberty Curious
Gen-Z gets a bad reputation as a screen-addicted generation of socialists with short attention spans, but Free the People co-founder and president Matt Kibbe is optimistic. Government excesses in recent years—like speech codes on public university campuses and heavy-handed lockdowns during the pandemic—have produced what Matt calls the “liberty curious.”
To present this nascent group with an alternative to the dominant left-right binary, the folks at Free the People are meeting young people where they’re at: online. “We wanted to reach young people with this radical idea that young people will be around longer than olds like me. We quickly realized that this needed to be video if it was going to be effective with young people,” Matt says in the interview.
With content as varied as short comedy sketches, podcasts, and feature-length documentaries, Matt’s team of creatives is spreading the ideas of liberty through the media young people actually consume. Of course, there’s no secret formula for breaking through to America’s youth. The key, Matt says, is humility.
“If you’re going into a market and you’re humble about what you think will work, you will discover that [young audiences] will actually tell you what they want,” Matt shares. With experimentation and a willingness to take risks and see what works, winning strategies rise to the top in the marketplace of ideas just as in the marketplace of a free economy.
“Show-Don’t-Tell” Documentaries
Film industry veteran Jim Tusty wants to make freedom more like Tide laundry detergent: something Americans know they can rely on even if they don’t understand how it works. It’s a framing Jim picked up from Bob Chitester, creator of Milton Friedman’s well-known Free to Choose program that employed documentary filmmaking to spread the idea that freedom gives rise to economic prosperity.
For Sky Films, the production company Jim co-founded, the Tide detergent approach means creating documentary films that showcase the benefits of freedom without preaching. “We focus on stories and not ideology,” as Jim puts it. By capturing a real story rather than forcing an ideological narrative onto a cast of real-life characters, Sky Films’ productions let audiences come to their own conclusions.
Take their latest, She Rises Up, which follows three women whose entrepreneurial spirits are helping to lift their local communities in Peru, Senegal, and Sri Lanka out of poverty. While the film conveys a theme of the importance of small businesses, She Rises Up has no narration to tell the audience what to think. The stories of Gladys, Magatte, and Selyna’s hard work speak for themselves.
Want to learn more about how these groups are advancing the free society through compelling short- and long-form filmmaking? You can listen to the entire episode with the player above, click the iTunes or Spotify icons at the top, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.
