Ready or Not

Ready or Not follows three families as they mentally and physically prepare for these devastating worldwide changes by becoming less reliant on technology and modern infrastructure."The consequences of not preparing are so much greater than the consequences of preparing. It's not worth a life," says Jules, Founder, "Path to Freedom", a self-sustaining urban homestead. Follow a family of urban farmers, a scientist, a musician, a medical researcher, and a filmmaker, as they journey to prepare for the future.

Directed by Melinda Briana Epler. Produced by Lindsay Trapnell and Matthew Williams.  Cinematography by Andrew Russo. Sound by Erik Anderson and Landon Johnson.  Edited by Bethe Gordon and Tim Kolesk. Music by Matt Fish, with Additional Music by Strunz and Farah.  Run time: 26:56.

Official Website:  http://www.elementsintime.com/readyornot

Creating Edible Landscape

Blog website:

http://www.elementsintime.com/blog

The Vanilla Queen

The Vanilla Queen follows Patricia Rain as she single-handedly takes on tropical deforestation and third world poverty by educating farmers in sustainable vanilla agriculture, establishing a worldwide cooperative of vanilla growers, and creating a first world market for fair trade vanilla.

At home, Patricia battles with breast cancer while she expands her online store for fair trade vanilla, and organizes a world-wide vanilla conference in Java, Indonesia. In Java, the Vanilla Queen will meet with the thousands of people she has positively affected across the world.

"I am only one person.  But as one person I can hopefully inspire and encourage others to also dedicate a portion of their lives to the service of our planet. I believe that I can be the change that I wish to see.  And so can the rest of us be the change we wish to see."  - Patricia Rain, the Vanilla Queen.

Produced and Directed by Melinda Briana Epler and Binnur Karaevli. Co-Producer Jill Rytie.  Currently in Pre-production.  Run Time:  56:40.

A World for Our Children (working title)

This thirteen part series focuses on a new social entrepreneur each week. Each of these amazing people is tackling a problem on multiple fronts, in order to ensure the next generation can grow up with food, water, shelter, health and education. 

Here are some of the stories this program will follow:

As in many areas of the world, India’s crop diversity has dwindled due to mono-cropping and large multi-national agri-businesses. Yet in the rural mountain villages of India, one woman is beginning to change that. Trained in biodiversity and nutrition, Rashmi works to revitalize the cultural identity of India by preserving indigenous traditions and encouraging community health. She has found that as rural farmers rediscover their cultural and agricultural traditions, they have begun to reconnect with their land. By the end of her program, each farming village begins using traditional and more sustainable methods of land cultivation. The program is so successful, the growers and Rashmi together have begun to catalogue every native crop in the nearby nature preserve, in order to utilize local diversity within their farms. 

During the Taliban regime and the war that followed, twenty girls attended a make-shift school, hidden in a teacher’s basement. Now at age twenty, one of them is determined to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan one woman and child at a time. In cramped refugee camps with few resources, Heba works to empower women with healthcare and education. Once they have the tools, Heba encourages the women to use their new skills to change the world around them:  to teach other women and children, and to become leaders in the rebuilding of their country.

Every day, many of Pakistan’s children flee from rural poverty to urban areas in hope of a better life, but soon become lost to crime and sex trafficking of the congested streets. In a unique street-wise program, Sarah is keeping children off the streets by setting up teams in bus stations to help children when they first run away, offering a safe place for children to stay and learn life skills, providing health care and counseling, and mediating between children and caregivers so if possible, eventually the children return to the safety of home.

A Franciscan nun dedicated to changing the world, Margaret is beginning her quest by tackling the stubborn cultural taboos surrounding HIV/AIDS in her native Kenya. By carefully incorporating village cultural beliefs into her programming, she creates informal women’s centers where at-risk women can relax and talk with one another in comfort as they receive counseling and health care. The women are encouraged to bring their children with them, so that they can play together in a safe environment.  Because the centers are highly effective but low in cost, Margaret plans to use her centers as a model throughout the African continent.

When Ritah returned to her native Rwanda after living most of her life as a refugee in Uganda, she saw an overwhelming fear in the eyes of her people. Since that day, she has been working to resurrect a country that has lost a generation of men, and a generation of doctors, teachers, leaders, and loved ones to genocide. Rita is bringing girls into schools, one by one. In villages where many have lost hope, Ritah’s program gathers the people together, where girls and boys from another village will act out the value of education in the form of plays. These performances bring needed hope to the actors in the play, needed education to the children who go to school as a result of the play, and needed unity to the communities brought together to watch the play. Among her many programs, Rita is also working to revamp the national education system so that it includes grief counseling and unity building.

Patricia is a woman on a mission and running out of time. In remission from advanced breast cancer, Patricia is determined to single-handedly take on tropical deforestation and third world poverty. Her tool:  the beautiful, sustainable, vining orchid called vanilla. From Santa Cruz, California, this grandmother is educating farmers in sustainable vanilla agriculture, establishing a worldwide cooperative of vanilla growers, and creating a first world market for fair trade vanilla. The Vanilla Queen will take us to indigenous Mayan villages in the tropical forests of Mexico, the remote islands of Tahiti and Madagascar, economically devastated regions of Haiti, and to the newly formed annual International Vanilla Conference in Java, Indonesia. In Java, Patricia will for the first time meet many thousands of people she has touched throughout the world, including a vanilla grower from Uganda fleeing from an abusive husband, and a young man fleeing his home and vanilla farm in Somalia after his entire family was killed in Somalia’s brutal war. Patricia has helped to bring hope and prosperity to a diverse group of people throughout the world, and to save countless portions of tropical forests from devastation due to unsustainable farming.

Produced and Directed by Melinda Briana Epler and Binnur Karaevli.  Co-Producer Jill Rytie.  In cooperation with Santa Clara University’s Global Women’s Leadership Network.  Currently in Development.  Thirteen-part series. Individual episode run times:  56:40.