Award-Winning Producer Sandra Schulberg to Present an Evening of Films at Swarthmore College

by Anita Pace
9/24/2008

Sandra Schulberg, independent film producer and Swarthmore College alumna, will present films from the touring series Selling Democracy, Films of the Marshall Plan: 1948-1953 at Swarthmore College on Tues., Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. in Science Center 101. The event is free and open to the public.

The retrospective features films that were part of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall's proposal after World War II to structure a U.S.-supported European recovery program. The films were selected by Schulberg and Ed Carter, documentary curator of the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Rainer Rother of Berlin's German Historical Museum. These films have been removed from view for nearly 60 years as a result of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Bill that prevented their being shown to American audiences. That bill was later lifted in 1990 thanks to an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. The Selling Democracy series is the first major effort to show these films publicly since the 1950s.

Screening highlights culled from the 25 films in the traveling include:

•  Me and Mr. Marshall, the first Marshall Plan film celebrating the rebuilding of Germany.
• The Story of Koula, about a small Greek boy trying to tame a giant American mule.
• Without Fear, the haunting fear of Communist inroads.

Schulberg is the founder and former president of the Independent Feature Project and the Independent Feature Film Market and cofounder of First Run Features. She is the daughter of Stuart Schulberg, chief of the Marshall Plan Motion Picture Section in Europe, and niece of Academy-award-winning screenwriter Budd Schulberg. She is currently at work on an international tour of the retrospective, a companion DVD, and a book. Further information about the Marshall Plan films is available at http://www.sellingdemocracy.org.

Presented by the Office of the President, Film and Media Studies and the Department of History, with support from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College.