ALS-Focused Grateful Featured at Heartland Film Festival

Experienced in education and business development strategies, Indiana entrepreneur Thomas Stoughton works with a diversity of consulting clients. Community focused, Thomas Stoughton was among those who helped launch the Heartland Film Festival, which has been running annually in Indianapolis for nearly three decades.

One unique short featured at the Heartland Film Festival in October 2018 was Grateful, which had its debut at the Indy Shorts International Film Festival. Also earning Best Documentary Film at the Circle City Festival and being shown internationally, Grateful focuses on one woman’s experience of living with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The film’s producer, Amy Pauszek, worked with a friend who is living with the progressive neurodegenerative disease on the documentary, which lent it a particularly heartfelt quality. As Ms. Pauszek describes it, people who view Grateful tend to laugh and cry while finding a source of inspiration. To date, this is the seventh film the producer has filmed in Indiana, with all having aimed at making a difference in people’s lives.

Heartland Film Festival Featured Women Directors, Unreleased Film

The president of the Indiana-based firm Business Consulting Incorporated for 10 years, Thomas Stoughton built a reputation as a distinguished public policy and educational technology consultant. Aside from his successful consulting business, Thomas Stoughton founded the Heartland Film Festival, held each year in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Held in October 2018, the 27th annual Heartland Film Festival screened more than 100 feature-length films on a wide variety of subjects. One of those screenings was of the motion picture What They Had before it was released nationwide. Featuring two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, What They Had tells the story of a family that struggles when confronting the matriarch’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Released everywhere on October 19, 2018, the film also stars Blythe Danner, Michael Shannon, and Robert Forster.

Aside from the buzz about the unreleased film, this year’s Heartland festival was marked by progress toward the goal of promoting gender equity. In 2018, the directors of half of the finalist films in the narrative and documentary categories were women. The festival also included a documentary about gender equity called Seeing is Believing: Women Direct. For information on the 2019 Heartland Film Festival, visit HeartlandFilm.org.

Indiana and International Films Make Impact at Heartland Film Festival

 

Heartland International Film Festival
Image: heartlandfilm.org

A longtime Indiana entrepreneur, Thomas Stoughton maintains a respected consulting services business that meets client needs in areas such as technology, education, and business development. Having helped launch a number of community programs in Indiana, Thomas Stoughton was a driving force in the development of the Heartland Film Festival.

Celebrating its 28th anniversary in 2019, the festival lasts 11 days and encompasses more than 300 film screenings, with approximately 100 filmmakers attending.

One unique film with a local angle, premiered at the 2018 festival, was Palace. Directed by a native Floridian who relocated to Indiana and became interested in patterns of rural life in the state, the film takes place in a bar called the Palace, where three unlikely characters meet and trade cross-generational stories. The film earned Heartland Film Festival official selection and has been shown throughout the country at theaters such as Fort Wayne’s Cinema Center.

Earning the Foreign Language Contender Award was Yomeddine, an Egyptian film about a man cured at a leprosy colony. The director uses this film to take a close look at the inhumane treatment of those with leprosy by society at large and within treatment facilities.