By James Arvantes

Award winning film-maker Lance Kramer has made three grounding-breaking documentaries during the past 15 years – films that inspire and inform while showing how people from opposite sides of the political spectrum can work together for the common good.

During a Feb. 20 Tuesday Talk event at the Cleveland Park Library, Kramer, a Cleveland Park resident and co-founder of Meridian Hill Pictures, described the three films in detail, explaining how each film challenged prevailing political concepts and norms while imparting its own unique lessons and wisdom along the way.

Kramer and his brother Brandon started Meridian Hill Pictures in 2010, and as filmmakers they are always on a “quest to better understand what things divide us and what kind of stories can bring us together,” Kramer told his Tuesday Talk audience. 

“My takeaway is the thing that will motivate people to bridge divides is the desire to get things done,” asserted Kramer, who received the DC Mayor’s Arts Award in 2014, the highest honor given to working artists in the city.

In the past 15 years the two brothers have made the following award-winning documentaries, movies that seem to prove Kramer’s point about motivating people to bridge divides.

Planting Trees & Dreams

During the early days of the Obama Administration, the two brothers embarked on their first feature film, City of Trees, investigating and documenting one of the largest green training programs in the country, which took place in Washington, D.C. The project, operated by a nonprofit called Washington Parks & People, hired unemployed residents to plant trees in parks in some of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. It was funded by a two-year grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The project’s goal was to reduce violence and crime by beautifying parks in the nation’s capital while giving unemployed residents jobs and job skills that they could then use to obtain future employment.

“We embedded ourselves into the program that received this grant,” explained Kramer, who was awarded four Individual Arts Fellowships by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. “We were really interested in documenting the (two-year) life cycle of the grant.”

Kramer told the audience that Meridian Hill Pictures “spent three years making the film and two years editing the film.” And according to Kramer, “it was a constant uphill process.”

The Kramer brothers grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., surrounded by people who tried to make the world a better place – teachers, government workers and nonprofit employees, among others.

“We saw how people talked privately about the struggles they faced to make changes,” said Kramer, who was selected to the 2018 Sundance Creative Producers Summit and the 2017 Impact Partners Documentary Producers Fellowship. “But we really didn’t see a discussion of those struggles represented in documentary film or any kind of film for that matter.”

Many documentary films focus on success stories, but City of Trees documented the challenges people and programs confront when trying to initiate and sustain change while running urban-based programs.

“It was a hard story to tell and very few people understood what we were trying to accomplish,” commented Kramer. 

One on-line review of the film said, “What sounds like a simple goal – putting people back to work by planting trees – becomes complicated by community tensions and a fast-approaching deadline before the grant money runs out.”

The film also documents some success stories, quoting one trainee, for example, who says, “I can’t imagine where I would be now if I was still doing all of the things I was doing a year ago. I will never hustle another day in my life.”

In a victory for Meridian Hill Pictures and the movie itself, PBS eventually aired the film and Netflix broadcast the documentary as well. The U.S. Forest Service, the agency responsible for awarding the grant to Washington Parks & People, expressed initial reservations about the making of City of Trees. 

But the Forest Service soon embraced the film, using it to train U.S. Forest Agency teams and the department’s grantees about environmental and racial justice.

City of Trees demonstrated that “nuance and complexity can transcend divisions,” said Kramer. And that, in turn, become the overriding lesson of City of Trees, according to Kramer.

Forging Friendships

While making City of Trees, Kramer and his brother became friends with Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones, who served as President Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs during the early days of the Obama Administration. 

In many ways, Jones embodied the hope and change of the Obama Administration. He also became a target of the early Tea Party movement – attacks that ultimately drove him out of the Obama Administration.

“We met Van a few years after his ouster from the White House at a time when he was trying to rebuild his life and reenter the public sphere,” said Kramer.

Jones learned through his own rise and fall that “good ideas on their own might not be enough to mobilize the base let alone transcend divisions across party lines,” Kramer said.

During the final months of the 2016 election, the Kramer brothers and Jones realized that voters in this country were drifting further and further apart, many seemingly becoming irreconcilable in their views and beliefs.

“We were hearing (on the news) about people who said they were going to support Trump, but we were not really seeing them,” Kramer explained. “I know it is hard to imagine given where we are now.”

The Kramers and Jones reflected how there was virtually no opportunities for interaction between the pro and anti-Trump voters in this country.

Jones developed the idea of sitting down and conducting a series of conversations with voters who had radically different views about the upcoming 2016 presidential election, an election that pitted Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Jones travelled to Gettysburg, Pa., to bring disparate voters together and hold dialogues across their differences. The series of conversations ultimately formed the three-part independent documentary series The Messy Truth, which went on to win two Webby-awards in 2017. It was viewed by more than 4 million people organically on Facebook.  

Opening Salvos

In an opening segment of The Messy Truth, Jones alludes to Gettysburg’s pivotal role in the Civil War, saying, “I am worried we are going to have another Civil War.” At one point Jones asked if wealthy countries like the United States “fight civil wars with tweets instead of bullets.”

During another segment, one of the participants told Jones, “That civil war you were talking about, I can see that happening. Hillary has done so many things wrong I don’t see how she is a candidate.”

Another voter, with a dramatically different view, said, “To allow a man like (Trump) to represent our great country is a sin.”

Yet another voter said, “(Clinton’s) principals are communistic,” while one voter dismissed Clinton as a “community organizer who couldn’t organize a colony of ants to a picnic.”

In exasperation, one voter throws up her proverbial hands and said, “It is not one side that is deplorable. This whole election is deplorable.”

Other residents of Gettysburg made more trenchant comments – one voter asking, for example, “How did we get to this point where you disagree with somebody and you have to be their enemy?”

One participant said, “Together we can solve a bunch of problems. Until we start doing this (listening to each other) all across the country, we are not going to make it.”

Incredibly, all of the voters in the film were able to talk to each other in civil tones, expressing their views without any rancor or bitterness, something increasingly rare in our polarized country.

The Messy Truth, like the City of Trees, imparted its own unique lesson – listening does not need to lead to agreement, said Kramer.

“Listening and agreement are not the same thing,” said Kramer. “But often listening is a good start.”

The Kramer brothers pitched the idea for the film to both distributors and broadcasters. But they declined, saying, “We are already covering the election wall to wall. What else could we possibly do that we are not already doing?”

“So we went out and made it ourselves,” Kramer said.

Kramer pointed out that Meridian Hill Pictures made the “entire project on a zero dollar budget,” creating the project solely from volunteer labor by the team who made City of Trees over the course of about six weeks.

The Kramer brothers posted the film to Facebook, using the medium almost like a television station.

“When we released it on Facebook we had almost 4 million people watching the entire series,” said Kramer.

The film generated tens of thousands of comments, most of them civil. In another triumph for Meridian Hill Pictures, CNN ultimately broadcast the film series, and CNN gave Jones his own show called the Messy Truth.

Prison Reform

Jones also became the catalyst for Meridian Hill’s next picture, The First Step, an award-winning feature-length documentary which followed Jones and a broad-based coalition of advocates as they sought to reform the nation’s criminal justice system by reducing long prison sentences for using illicit drugs, especially crack cocaine.

By early 2017, Trump was in the White House, and it seemed as though Republicans and Democrats would never reach an agreement on anything substantive. But in the midst of this divisiveness, Jones and the Kramer brothers found a “sliver of hope,” two areas where both political parties could agree, which was criminal justice reform and alternative ways to handle the nation’s addiction crisis.

As Kramer explained, “These two issues had gotten so big and expensive in their reach and devastation they were still impacting people across regions, across race and across political boundaries.”

Jones was convinced that if individual people impacted by these twin crises could meet each face-to-face and break bread together, they might listen to each other and agree to work together. They all shared a common “pain point,” said Kramer.

Jones, employing his grass roots organizing skills, put together a bi-partisan group of legislators, as well as grassroots activists from conservative enclaves such as West Virginia and progressive areas such as South Central Los Angeles.

“It took us three years to build these relationships and to tell the story during the course of the administration,” said Kramer. “It took two years to edit the film.”

The fight to enact the legislation, which became known as The First Step, created “a ton of backlash,” especially from left-leaning individuals, who were angry with Jones and the Kramer brothers for working with the Trump administration to pass the bill.

But in the end, the criminal justice reform measure became law in late 2018, resulting in the release of about 30,000 people from federal prisons thus far. Most of the people released from custody had been sentenced to disproportionately long prison terms for using crack cocaine during the 1990s. They were able to come home thanks to a provision in the bill that reduced the sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine.  

“Many are now home with their families,” Kramer said with satisfaction.

World Premiere 

The First Step premiered at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and was an official selection at more than 30 other film festivals across the country. The film was also shown in movie theatres, schools, community centers, recovery centers and in various prisons.

“We did a release in about 35 states,” said Kramer.

Meridian Hill Pictures wanted to release the picture in more states, but they lacked the money. Many distributors balked at distributing and showing the film because it “represented the Trump Administration with nuance and complexity,” Kramer said.

“Ultimately, we took the process into our own hands,” said Kramer. “We mobilized a network of partner organizations across the country, either working on the front lines of criminal justice reform, or on addiction and recovery.” 

Meridian Hill Pictures was able to get more than 100 organizations to participate in the film’s release between 2021 and 2023.

In Arizona, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative organization co-founded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, and the liberal Americans Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, joined forces to show the movie in that state, further demonstrating that criminal justice reform has bi-partisan support. 

The film itself provided lesson number three which is: “Common pain can lead to common purpose,” said Kramer. 

“In my experience, it is one of the only effective things I have seen that actually works when it comes to getting things accomplished, particularly legislatively,” commented Kramer.

Washington Area Roots

In talking about his career, Kramer provided a brief sketch of his background, telling the audience, for example, he is a fourth-generation Washingtonian who was raised in a Jewish family in Bethesda, Md.

His grandparents owned one of the original stores in Union Market in Northeast, Washington, called Kramer and Sons. He grew up in a Democratic family and in a neighborhood dominated by Democratic voters.

“There were a few Republicans in my family and a few in my neighborhood, but they kept it pretty secret,” he said.

He has lived in Cleveland Park for the past 10 years, a neighborhood he “loves.” Kramer explained that he always had a deep interest in politics and a “passion for film,” two overriding interests he has been able to pursue as a filmmaker.

Daunting Task

As a filmmaker, Kramer has documented pain and suffering. His next film could be his most heart wrenching. 

He is now working on a film about a relative kidnapped during the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and taken as a hostage to the Gaza Strip. In some ways, Kramer’s family in Israel is trying to accomplish a seemingly impossible task by bringing a loved one home while working for peace, a conundrum similar to the ones represented in the Kramer brothers’ prior films.

Kramer is determined to document what the family is going through – to capture their pain and anguish in a complex and empathetic way and ultimately tell a story that will, in his words, “move through the world.”