Regina Sobel

Fire is a force for destruction, but also of rebirth. This vivid lesson is at the heart of Fire Among Giants, a provocative and intimate look at a world famous forest in the wake of the most destructive inferno on record. The ancient redwoods of California’s Big Basin State Park have witnessed centuries of change, and now they will stand sentinel over a landscape forced to rebound in a rapidly warming climate.

Angela Chaddlesone McCarthy was a teenage mother raised on a Native American reservation who overcame great odds to become a Kiowa tribe legislator in Oklahoma.

A devout Christian, Jerry Givens was Virginia’s chief executioner, before he became an advocate of abolishing the death penalty.

When his son-in-law was killed in a tragic car crash, World War II veteran Calvin Haworth became a surrogate parent and an activist against drunk driving in Minnesota.

A hard-working bricklayer from the projects, Humberto Trujillo helped build the main Phoenix post office — and rose to become his city’s first Hispanic postmaster.

Rosary Castro-Olega was a retired nurse who returned to the frontlines to fight the virus, ultimately becoming one of the Filipino-American nurses who were disproportionately killed by the virus.

In 1963, Ed Dwight Jr. was poised to be NASA’s first African-American astronaut, until suddenly he wasn’t.

In the mid-1960s, four teenagers from Liverpool were changing the face of pop music. Their names were Mary, Sylvia, Pam, and Val — the Liverbirds!

Kim Hill was a rising singer when she met a young rapper named will.i.am, but she quit the Black Eyed Peas just before they became famous.

"For almost three decades, I’ve been making visual art with New York City at its center. I’m especially drawn to everyday moments that, when you focus on them, have unexpected emotional power: the riveted expressions of lunchgoers scanning a salad bar, the split-second disorientation of commuters emerging from the subway onto the street. I work mostly in public, but I don’t know how to do that right now. So I find myself looking back on footage I shot in the past to try to make sense of the present. In the short documentary above, I revisited a video I shot in the early 1990s, of shopkeepers near my East Village apartment throwing open their gates in the morning, to reflect on the perpetual change and resilience that mark life in New York City." - Neil Goldberg