Tami Gold’s latest documentary, Another Brother, tells the story of a young African-American Marine, Clarence Fitch, who left for Viet Nam in 1967 and returned with a heroin habit he would spend 15 years kicking. Son of a proud World War II vet, Fitch had joined the Marines to get an education; what he got was a habit and a lifetime in the U.S. Postal Service. He cleaned up in 1983 and spent the next seven years until his death from AIDS as an anti-war activist and rehab counselor.

Gold uses tape of an interview Fitch did with photographer Bill Short as the film’s backbone. "People ask how a lesbian feminist came to tell a story like this," she says. "It’s about class, which is the underpinning of everything, and the vulnerability of veterans damaged by war. Only understanding how traumatic the war had been for him gave Clarence the power to put drugs down for good."

Gold is best known for Out at Work, an hour-long doc about gay men and lesbians on the job that premiered at Sundance ’97. In 1996 she directed her first narrative short, Emily and Gitta, at AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. Gold, 47, made her first film, the 30-minute My Country Occupied, at 21 in Guatamala with a 16mm Bolex and was an original member of the Newsreel Collective, the documentary co-op precursor to today’s Third World Newsreel. Currently a professor at Hunter College, Gold’s been working sporadically on Brother for five years. "With documentaries sometimes you need to let them sit and do something else," she says. She financed the film with grants from CUNY and four private foundations. Another Brother will be finished at an hour’s length with an eye towards TV, though Gold has mapped out a 75-minute version suitable for theatrical play. To gauge the film’s impact, Gold took rough cuts into high school classrooms. "It’s a way of applying Hollywood test screening [principles] on a grass-roots level to see what works and what doesn’t as you’re editing," she says. The film should be done in March – coincidentally the 30th anniversary of the Tet offensive and peak of the student protest movement – and all rights are available.

Crew: Producer/Director, Tami Gold; Associate Producer/Researcher, Caryn Rogoff, Elena Schwolsky-Fitch; Camera, Gold, Robert Rosenberg, David Shulman; Addtional Camera, Ronald Gray; Editors, Kelly Anderson, Beverly Peterson, Gisela Rosario; Original Score, Don Dinicola; Original Song, Toshi Reagon. Contact: Tami Gold, AndersonGold Films, 151 First Avenue, Suite 210, New York, NY 10003. Tel/Fax: (212) 982-7222.

All Of It - Jody Podolsky
Another Brother - Tami Gold
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La Cucaracha - Jack Perez
Desert Blue - Morgan J. Freeman
The Money Shot - Matt Mailer
SHOCK TV - Whitney Ransick
The Sky Is Falling - Florrie Lawrence
Snapped - Jesse Fiegelman
was once a girl... - Hellin Kay