Established in 1989 by director and producer Andrea Kalin, the company specializes in creating socially conscious media used to raise public awareness in America and throughout the world. The company has produced over a dozen films, including ten feature-length documentaries, including First Lady of the Revolution, Red Lines, No Evidence of Disease, Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, Worlds of Sounds: Ballard of Folkways, Talking Through Walls, Prince Among Slaves, Allah Made Me Funny, The Pact, and Partners of the Heart. Partners of the Heart, narrated by Morgan Freeman, aired on PBS’s American Experience in February 2003 and was rebroadcast in March 2005. Partners of the Heart went on to win the Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004 and was later turned into the Golden Globe-nominated HBO film Something The Lord Made starring Mos Def, who also narrated Prince Among Slaves. As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, the National Endowment for the Humanities highlighted Partners of the Heart as one of 50 top grant projects that have enriched and shaped American lives. Spark Media's films have won numerous awards, among them Emmys, CINEGolden Eagles, Gracies, as well as a Writers Guild of America nomination.
Current projects
In early 2019, Spark Media completed production on Scattering CJ, the story of CJ Twomey, a seemingly happy Air Force recruit who violently ended his own life at age 20, whose passing plunged his family into unrelenting grief and guilt. Years later, in a moment of desperate inspiration, his mother put out an open call on Facebook, looking only for a handful of world travelers who might help fulfill her son's wish to see the world by scattering some of his ashes in a place of beauty or special meaning to them - a call that 21,000 would answer. Scattering CJ had its world premiere at the Camden International Film Festivalin September 2019. Spark Media is also producing an adaptation of Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica, about George Bridgetower, a black musician and friend of Ludwig van Beethoven. The film, also entitled 'Sonata Mulattica,' will detail Bridgetower's life and relationship with Beethoven, and contrast that story to a contemporary young black musician, Joshua Coyne. Spark Media is also in post-production on Klandestine Man, about Stetson Kennedy, the folklorist and social justice activist who famously infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s with the goal of dismantling the violent white supremacist group from the inside out.
