The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day is a 90-minute documentary film-in-progress on the life and times of Thomas Day. The film’s creator and executive producer is Laurel C. Sneed, Executive Director of the Apprend Foundation, Inc., and director of the Thomas Day Education Project/ Crafting Freedom Workshops. The film received a major Media-Makers Grant (2009-2010) from the NEH for the development of a script. The scriptwriter is multiple-award winning documentary producer and writer, Stephen Stept. He has been a principal of three major television projects funded by NEH: Henry Luce and Time-Life’s America: A Vision of Empire, which he produced, wrote and directed for PBS’s American Masters series; Darrow, a feature-length dramatic biography of Clarence Darrow, starring Kevin Spacey, which Stept conceived, co-produced and co-wrote for PBS’s American Playhouse; and To Be Somebody, which he produced, wrote and directed for Blackside Productions’ series, The Great Depression, and for which he received an Emmy nomination for writing. Stept has recently been nominated for an Emmy for his 2008 MSNBC documentary, Witness to Jonestown.
The Director of “The Thin Edge of Freedom” is acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Dante James, who refined his craft at Blackside an African American documentary organization based in Boston during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Blackside produced legendary films on Black subjects such as “Eyes on the Prize” and “This Far By Faith.”James continues today to teach about African Americans and the African American historical experience through documentary films. He was the series producer of the emmy-award winning PBS documentary series “Slavery and the Making of America” (2006) and recently directed “Harlem in Paris” for WNET (2009).
A production grant to produce The Thin Edge of Freedom will submitted to NEH in August 2011 and grant awards will be announced in April 2012.