On the one-year anniversary of a tornado that devastated Joplin, MO, a group of actors produced a public reading of “The Book of Job,” the story of a man so cursed that he turns against God. It started a community conversation that continues today. The reading was produced by Outside the Wire, an organization that that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues, and performed by Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti, Arliss Howard, and David Strathairn.
PopTech is committed to ways that the arts can promote healing, and this story was a perfect match. We wanted to capture the Outside the Wire’s event in Joplin, MO – the first recipient of PopTech’s Impact Fund – to drive awareness of this important focus on the mental health and morality of a community at large following a tragedy.
We identified Outside the Wire founder, Bryan Doerries, as the strongest ‘character’ in the story, and followed him through the process of setting up for and producing the event, weaving in snippets of the performance to illustrate the topic at hand, and then ending the film at the beginning of the event as the curtain rose.
In addition to being shown from the PopTech stage, the film was picked up by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and was selected as a finalist in The Rockefeller Foundation’s Storytelling Challenge.