Directing
What Henry David Thoreau did for two years Anna and Harlan Hubbard did for forty. Anna and Harlan lived life as few people in modern times have and in doing so inspired thousands. Wonder: The Lives of Anna and Harlan Hubbard , a new documentary by Morgan Atkinson, brings to life their adventures. Harlan was an artist, writer and naturalist born in northern Kentucky. Anna, a scholar and librarian from Grand Rapids, MI. They met in Cincinnati and began their life together in the mid-1940's by building a boat, then floating from Cincinnati to New Orleans. Their voyage lasted five years. They then settled on the banks of the Ohio River in rural Kentucky. In a house they built by hand, sustained by food they raised or caught, aided by no electricity or modern convenience, Anna and Harlan, met the world on their own terms and found deep meaning. Wonder considers their astonishing life of freedom and what it says to Americans today.
This 2018 documentary produced by Morgan Atkinson, is an examination of that most valuable community treasure — the Free Public Library. This thought-provoking video explores the value, meaning and impact of a free library. Is the community’s investment in a public library at least equal to its benefit from it? How does a library survive the spiraling momentum of digitizing text and making all ‘content’ increasingly available through computers and mobile devices. Atkinson has fun with this deep topic, taking the audience on a tour of Kentucky’s largest public library system, Louisville. Along the way, the importance of a library to a democracy unfolds. Acclaimed Louisville actor/musician, Will Oldham, is the quirky yet reliably knowledgeable tour guide, playfully exposing the challenges faced by the public library system, while pointing to intriguing details of its history at varied branch locations.
This documentary focuses on the journey of Merton, a bohemian who went from communism to Catholicism before finding his calling as a monk cloistered in eastern Kentucky for 27 years. It also covers his writing career which examined spirituality, the Cold War, the civil rights movement and being an individual in a post-modern world
Documentary about John Howard Griffin, a white man who disguised himself as a black man (dying his skin) and traveled through the South during the Civil Rights era. He did so because he was writing a news article about discrimination against blacks in the South. He wrote a famous book called "Black Like Me," describing his adventures.
