GOVERNMENT! The Agencies We Think We Know is a series of ten feature documentaries, each one focusing on a controversial government agency. We will tell the dramatic and unexpected stories of why these agencies were founded in the first place, providing historical context and using select archival footage. We will ask our scholars and experts: Are all these agencies still necessary? Have some of them become too big? Do others need to evolve to meet a growing need or danger?
We will talk to the people who built these agencies, and who work in them day after day. What does it mean to be a career civil servant? What happens when political appointees are asked to lead people who have worked at these agencies for decades?
Through insightful interviews with experts and government officials, we will engage in a conversation about how our country actually works.
The Team
Producer/Director Alana DeJoseph
Emmy-winning director/producer Alana DeJoseph was associate producer of the PBS documentaries The Greatest Good (about the U.S. Forest Service) and Green Fire (about conservationist Aldo Leopold). Her second feature documentary about a US government agency came in the form of A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps. On September 22nd, 2019 the film premiered to a full house at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In 2020 she won the Best Director award in the feature documentary category at the Indo Global International Film Festival in Mumbai and in 2024 she won an Emmy for A Towering Task. The film has screened at 11 film festivals and won numerous awards and continues to broadcast on public television stations bringing the discussion about global citizenship to communities across the country and the globe.
Producer/Writer Shana Kelly
Shana Kelly began her career as a literary agent at the William Morris Agency in New York and London for ten years. She currently works as a documentary screenwriter, book editor, and teacher at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. In 2024, she won an Emmy for writing A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps, a historical documentary which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in 2019 and aired on PBS in September 2023. Recently, she wrote the documentary Just the Beginning: A Century of Political Power and the League of Women Voters.
Director of Photography Mariam Dwedar
Mariam Dwedar is an Emmy Award-winning Egyptian-Filipina cinematographer and filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York. She has contributed to Peabody Award- and Webby Award-winning projects, filmed on field productions around the world covering a range of topics, and her clients include an array of media from independent documentaries to television comedies and news programs. Recently, Mariam was recognized by DONY, America's largest documentary festival, as one of '40 Under 40' rising stars in documentary filmmaking.
Stay tuned as we launch into production! Got questions before then? Contact us with any insights, suggestions, contacts, or if you just want to connect!
