A preview of the upcoming documentary film and media project

Stuck in the Doorway

Few images of the past decade have been as gripping as those coming out of Greece in the summer and fall of 2015, as waves of refugees struggled to reach the shores of Europe.  The whole world watched as over one million refugees crossed by land and sea. Stuck In The Doorway is documenting what happens after the media circus moves on and after the first exuberance fades and the international interest and money disappears. This is a conversation with Michel Bolsey, one of the project’s co-producers. Bolsey will show us footage taken in Greece last May during principal photography, and introduce us to people from a wide variety of countries via their stories, hopes and dreams as they struggle to create new lives for themselves, often in the face of fear, suspicion and kafka-esque bureaucratic obstacles.

Michel Bolsey has a long history of involvement in the Middle East and Greece. He was as a schoolteacher in a Lebanese village during the 70s and continued as a journalist operating out of Lebanon for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Aramco Magazine and others. He founded and hosted the award-winning Pacifica Radio program Middle East in Focus, devoted to news, politics, and culture from that region. MEIF was one of the first news programs in the United States to bring Palestinians and Israelis together around a microphone. Bolsey continued to host MEIF for ten years, and 37 years later the program still airs on the Pacifica network. In the course of his reporting career, Bolsey has been a regular visitor to Greece, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine and Egypt. He also brings to the project a variety of IT skills, the result of a 30-year day job in IT support, networking, web development and data programming. Bolsey is bilingual in French and English, fluent in Levantine Arabic and speaks conversational Greek.

Thursday, October 19, 4:30 pm, PAC 002

Free and open to the public

The Right Now! Series presents lectures, workshops, and other events responding to breaking issues in public life, bringing together academic and nonacademic speakers and audiences to consider ideas and events that are of pressing importance.

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life