IB graduate profile - Adam Elend

Graduated from St. Petersburg High School, USA, in 1995.

"My name is Adam Elend, and I'm a documentary filmmaker living in Tampa, Florida. I'm a graduate of St. Petersburg High School's IB program (class of 1995) in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I attended Florida State University's Film School.

I was first bitten by the documentary bug in my second year at Florida State. I produced a short film that considered the issue of racism in southern fraternities — a sensitive subject in Tallahassee, which has been called the buckle of America's bible belt. While I naturally expected a negative reaction from the fraternities, I was shocked to find resistance from the university administration and even from the film school. With a little creative use of the local media, I was able to strong arm the university into cooperating, but the experience taught me a lot about the power of investigative journalism and documentary film.

After graduating in 1998, I moved to Los Angeles with a fellow film student and we founded E.M. Productions, a production company dedicated to "inspiring activism through innovative entertainment." We started the company by taking any commercial gigs we could get, doing as much creative work as we could afford to, and still working full-time jobs to pay the bills. After two years, we were finally able to quit our day jobs and dedicate ourselves fully to E.M. Productions. In 2002, we relocated to Tampa to be closer to several of our major projects and clients.

Our company in its current form serves three functions - we produce and market independent social issue documentaries, provide media consulting for progressive political candidate and issue campaigns, and engage in freelance reporting for independent media outlets. In all of our work, we seek to further a collaboration between media and direct action. For example, we often screen our projects in conjunction with conferences and panel discussions. We are also in the process of attacking the constitutionality of "free speech zones" established at events attended by the president. We were arrested for refusing to go to the free speech zone while protesting peacefully on public property at a George W. Bush rally in November 2002. At the rally, we had signs that quoted the 1968 supreme court case that declared that type of free speech restriction unconstitutional, Tinker v. Desmoines. We are now seeking a declaratory judgment in court that protest zones are unconstitutional, and we are creating a 30-minute documentary about the experience.

Currently, most of our resources are directed towards our first feature length documentary, FIGHTING FOR LIFE IN THE DEATH-BELT. The film considers the death penalty in America through eyes of Stephen Bright, one of the nation’s leading capital defense attorneys, who has dedicated his life to representing death row inmates and fighting to end capital punishment. We followed Bright last summer as he worked to simultaneously defend one client in a capital trial and another client facing execution in the same week.  We are now screening a rough cut of the film at colleges and universities
around the country including Yale, NYU, Columbia, Penn, and many others.

Overall, I can't imagine a better experience then the journey I have made since graduating from the IB program. I find it incredibly rewarding to own my own business and spend every day doing what I love. I am married to an incredible woman who works in environmental policy, and we are looking forward to building our lives around the progressive work that both of us enjoy.

I learned a lot at St. Pete High, but I have to say in retrospect that the course in Latin American History left the biggest impression on me. Exploring the United States' tragic relationship with the countries of Latin America caused me to think critically for the first time about the power of reporting facts accurately (or inaccurately, for that matter) and placing them in a realistic context. I try to keep that lesson in mind in all the work that I do."