
About the Filmmakers
 
Robert Lamothe, director, producer, videographer, and editor of South Shore People Power began this documentary in 2017. He is an independent, outsider filmmaker making self funded films on micro budgets. He has been making social justice documentaries for over 20 years. His previous films include New Dreams for a New World, Street Scenes 15, TEACH, Teachers are Talking, Is the Nation Listening, and Issues of Homelessness, Teachers and Students Explore Causes and Solutions and other social justice short films. TEACH received the Indie Spec Best Cinematography Award from the Boston International Film Festival and was nominated for the Best US Documentary Feature Award from the International Film Festival of Manhattan 2012.
Robert worked as a Union Organizer, Union Representative, and has a Masters of Labor Studies from UMass Amherst Labor Relations and Research Center. He has been active in social justice movements since 1969 including the UFW boycotts, the Farah Pants and Coors Beer boycotts, the anti-apartheid movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement and multiple other anti-war movements, social and racial justice movements, the free Mumia Abu Jamal movement, the free Leonard Peletier movement, the women's movement, the environmental justice and climate chaos movements, and the anti-nuclear power movement.
Robert also was a primary school classroom teacher in project based, child- centered, first, second, third and kindergarten classes in Boston, Brookline, and Winchester and taught high school technology in Boston. He also worked in the high tech industry for several years in Cambridge and Boston. He brought this experience with him to as a high school inner-city instructional technology teacher. Robert taught for 20 years.
TEACH was his first feature length documentary.

Yvonne Lamothe, a painter and visual art teacher has taught in city schools for 23 years. She received National Board certification in adolescent through young adult visual art in 2000. She has contributed to the making of Teach in many capacities, advising, directing, set design, cinematography, interviewing, photography and writing. The importance of setting the record straight about the real work teachers do and the need for equity and respect for all children in their learning and in their lives has motivated her interest in the development of TEACH. This is her first feature length documentary.

Marc Gurvitch - Producer
Currently based in Boston, he comes to documentary filmaking via a long and twisting road. After completing PhD courses in Economics, he began a career as a nursing assistant in a public psychiatric hospital, and then becoming a cinematically inspired nurse, (Titticut Follies, Nurse Ratchett). After a few too many communication failures with his patients, he became a car salesman, and found to his surprise that his psychiatric skills were useless in selling power to the powerless, but very useful in diagnosing and referring his fellow salesmen. He is currently a clinical instructor in psychiatric nursing. He has been inspired by the documentary films of Julia Reichert and Lorraine Gray.
|