Give a voice to the voiceless.
A picture may be worth a thousand words but a web video can be worth hundreds of thousands viewers, dollars, and donors.
Corporations and startups are leveraging the power of the video in ad campaigns. But organizations that need to raise money or awareness the most – domestic violence nonprofits, homeless shelters, child abuse counseling services, health clinics – don’t have the kind of time, resources, or money to even produce a video. Banyan Productions enables these small but impactful nonprofit organizations to launch videos and outreach campaigns so they can raise money or awareness.
I know the power of film to create lifetime awareness. For over 10 years, I've worked as a journalist, screenwriter, producer and an activist for children and women's healthcare. I've created media and produced films on birth defects, HIV, and oral cancer. I have witness the power of outreach through a video or presentation.
Our first video is dedicated to actual life-and-death situations that are arising in many states. For thousands of women, men, and families across the country, clinics like Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and other women's clinics are their only source for primary care, annual physical checkups, mammograms, STD testing and treatment, contraception, and health education.
The people using these services come from all religious affiliations and all economic backgrounds. Some are professionals in between jobs, some may be migrant workers, or contract employees without steady insurance, students, laborers, or simply unemployed heads of families. For all of them, clinics are a necessity even if it's to learn how to navigate insurance forms.
Like many clinics around the country, 97% of the services PPMM provides deal with primary care and life saving health service, like STD testing and breast cancer screenings. The cost of these clinics shutting down means diagnoses like PCOS, STDs, irregular PAP smears, and even breast cancer go undiagnosed. The cost is that people still go to the Emergency Room for non-emergencies raising all of our healthcare costs.
It’s time that women begin talking to another about health concerns that affect us all – and many of us may need these services, if not at a Planned Parenthood then at some clinic in our nation which has the costliest health insurance in the world.
This isn’t about politics or beliefs, it’s not even about women, it’s about families and our health.
JENNY CHU (videographer, editor for PPMM Project)
After spending years as a still photographer, Jenny Chu shifted her focus to tv and documentary film and received a masters degree in journalism at U.C. Berkeley. She has traveled extensively, documenting the ethnic minority groups of China, the massive changes overtaking Shanghai, and the struggles of those in war-torn and poverty-stricken African countries. Now she produces video news stories and documentaries both locally and abroad. Her clients include Frontline World, KQED, Asian Art Museum, SF Jazz, SEIU-UHW and Time.com.
AMISHA UPADHYAYA (producer, director)
Amisha has been a journalist and crime reporter for publications like “The Independent,” an award winning screenwriter and playwright winning dozens of film festivals like Asian American Theatre Company, the Nickelodeon TV Writing Script Winner, the Lark Theatre Development Project, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, among many others.
She has produced films and documentaries like the short “Imperfection,” that premiered at Lincoln Center and won the IAAC Film Festival for best dramatic short, the feature, “A Place” about HIV in India that won Asian American Film Festival for best dramatic script, and “A Jihad for Love,” filmed in 12 countries that premiered at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and gained 38 country distribution and US national theatrical release.
