Sacred, a feature-length film that will premiere nationwide on Mon., Dec. 10, at 10 p.m. on PBS, explores faith from around the globe, examining religious rituals from birth to death. It is a rare documentary in that there are no narrators. The lives of the subjects alone tell the story. Directed by Academy Award-winner Thomas Lennon, the film weaves scenes from around the world, by more than 40 different filmmakers, into a single work.

“Today, not many people would dispute the importance of religion,” said director Thomas Lennon, “But we in media usually look at it socially and politically. Here the goal is to plunge the viewer into a series of private experiences of faith and hopefully the intensity of that encounter shakes up our reactions, triggers something fresh.”

Baker said that the Schwartz Center was intricately involved in making the film for New York’s Public Broadcasting Station (WNET/THIRTEEN). The center also commissioned Juilliard composer Edward Bilous to write and score the music, and Patrick Ryan, S.J., Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, served as a consultant on the film. Though Dec. 10 will mark the U.S. nationwide premiere, Sacred has been shown at film festivals around the world. 

“While religion, often rightly, gets blamed for many problems, it seems that most of us need some kind of faith to get us through life,” said Baker. “This film celebrates how all faiths, however different, are trying to achieve the same thing—get it closer to God.”

William Baker, Ph.D., Fordham’s Claudio Acquaviva Chair and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy at the Graduate School of Education, wrote an Op-Ed in which he ponders the future of television news in the United States. In it, he says Germany has a successful model worthy of emulating.

Writing for Current, a nonprofit news service for and about public media in the United States, Baker says:

“Germany has a nightly public television program called Tagesschau (basically, ‘Daily Show’), arguably the highest-rated news program in the western world. Ten million people tune in each evening, in a country with a quarter of the U.S. population. The broadcast has a 34 percent share of the audience, nearly bettering the combined audience share of all the American networks, PBS and cable newscasts combined. The Germans have a heterogeneous audience that sits around the common campfire to listen to the day’s stories.”

Baker then explains how the show’s open and straightforward style, which does not include any tabloid or soft news, nets them success:

“To draw together an immense, heterogeneous, multigenerational audience requires trustworthy sources and reporters of the highest integrity. Tagesschau has both in abundance, but its formula does not depend on a Walter Cronkite figure; the program uses newsreaders who follow a script provided by a deep team of top editors and researchers. Their objective is to be the most reliable source of news, not just the fastest. Every story is checked two to three times by different editors before going live.”

Can the United States restore trust in the media? Read more of his thoughts in his Op-Ed via Current.

For many, these momentous events are marked through religious rituals. Birth can be celebrated with a baptism or a bris. An Indian marriage ceremony is as solemn and beautiful as one held in Spain. And a funeral in New Orleans is as celebratory as an Irish wake.

Sacred, a new feature-length film, explores these religious rituals around the globe from birth to death. It is a rare documentary in that there are no narrators. The lives of the subjects tell the story alone.

The film will premiere at DocNYC Film Festival on Nov. 12, and Nov. 14 at IFC Center. It will have additional premieres at festivals in Amsterdam and Tokyo in the next month.

“It’s a beautiful film and truly profound,” said the film’s producer William Baker, Ph.D., Fordham’s Claudio Acquaviva Chair and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education at the Graduate School of Education.

Baker said that the center was intricately involved in making the film for New York’s Public Broadcasting Station (WNET/THIRTEEN). The center also commissioned Juilliard composer Edward Bilous to write and score the music and recommended Academy Award winner Thomas Lennon as director. Patrick Ryan, S.J., Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, served as a consultant on the film.

“We want to show how people of all faiths use their beliefs to go through life—from birth through our death,” Baker said. “There are great similarities; in a sense we’re all doing the same things.”

Lennon’s process in making the film was as diverse as its subject matter, Baker said. Lennon sourced contributions from more than 40 filmmakers and asked them to record intimate scenes from more than 25 countries. The storyline follows life’s journey from birth to death in a linear fashion, but it diverges to explore the many ways that people around the globe experience faith.

With a $3 million budget, the film was a costly project for public television, said Baker. It was largely possible because of a $1 million gift from WNET board member George O’Neal and close friend and supporter Janet Carrus.

With seven Emmy awards behind him, Baker said he knew he had to create “something special.” The film will make the festival circuit and will likely be shown in art house cinemas before being aired on PBS next year. Baker is also hoping the film can be shown on campus as well.

While Baker said the project was “gestating” for about six years, it took only two years to complete. He said the process has confirmed his belief that faith—no matter the religion—is critical to human survival.

“We know now that religion has been blamed for a lot of the problems that exist in the world, but it should be praised for helping people get though life,” he said.

Now William F. Baker, PhD, the Claudio Acquaviva SJ Chair and Journalist in Residence, has compiled a new book that culls some of that class’s major notes.

Baker, together with Evan Leatherwood and Warren Gibson, PhD, has published
The Worlds a Stage: How performing artists can make a living while still doing what they love (American Management Association, 2016). The book follows the storied history of the performing arts and finds that, while the artists’ world has changed, their struggle to make a living has not.

“The fine performing arts have forever existed in a precarious position,” said Leatherwood, a Slifka Fellow at Fordham’s Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education. “We’re letting people know that is normal, but we’re arming them with current knowledge.”

The book’s section titles suggest that the artist’s history of struggle and triumph is a long one. Sections include “Mozart and the Hustler,” “George Gershwin Catches a Wave,” and “Beverly Sills: Artist, Manager, Mom.”

“Only in the 20th century did people really begin to do this full-time,” said Baker.

But the book doesn’t linger in the past for long. Many contemporary managers who were guest lecturers for the Fordham/Juilliard class made themselves available for interviews—such as Peter Gelb, manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The book documents how Gelb’s embrace of technology has brought the world’s largest nonprofit performing arts institution into the 21st century.

The digital platform that has taken Met performances to millions of new viewers through its Live in HD broadcasts is examined in “The Technology Gamble.” These live broadcasts, which are shown in movie theaters around the world, bring in $17 million annually. Yet, Baker said, the institution’s budget of nearly $325 million often operates at a loss.

Baker said that most of his students, both artists and business majors, don’t realize that 30 percent of an arts institution’s budget comes from philanthropy, not ticket sales—something explained in the chapter “Fundraising.”

“When you are a performer, you don’t go back to your dressing room and relax,” said Baker. “If somebody applauded for you, you go out and find them and become their friend, because you’re going to need their support.”

Others featured in the book are Carnegie Hall Executive and Artistic Director Clive Gillison and the American Ballet Theater’s former CEO Rachel Moore.

“That was a failure of the policies, but in the end, we won. Consumption of sugary drinks during that time period has fallen dramatically in New York City,” he said at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Sept. 29.

Farley, the New York City Health Commissioner from 2009 to 2014, noted that annual surveys have found that the amount of sugary drinks that people say they drink daily has dropped by a third. The nation of Mexico and the city of Berkeley, California, have also instituted soda taxes similar to the one that was defeated in New York in 2012.

Farley’s appearance, with moderator William Baker, PhD, journalist-in-residence and Claudio Acquaviva Chair at the Graduate School of Education, marked the third in a series of Fordham’s Oral Archive on Governance in New York City: The Bloomberg Years.

In a lengthy Q&A with Baker and audience members, Farley lamented that too much attention is lavished on ways we can protect ourselves individually, even though we benefit more from group efforts.

“I saw a headline the other day, ‘What you can do to protect yourself from getting an antibiotic-resistant infection.’ And the answer is really, nothing. There’s almost nothing you can do individually,” he said.

“But there’s a lot we can do as a society to prevent that.”

Reminiscing about his time in office, Farley praised the former mayor for making decisions based on data and not asking him what the political ramifications might be. That isn’t to say that Bloomberg gave the thumbs up to every idea Farley and his team proposed: Farley said he shot down an idea to ban the sale of cigarettes at pharmacies—which he noted have a “halo of health” around them that conflicts with cigarettes—and to ban their sale within a certain distance of schools.

“He listened and gave it a fair hearing, but at the end he said no. Because while he’s a public health guy, he’s also a businessman who kind of chastens at the idea of government interfering with business,” he said.

Farley said he was most proud to have put the issue of sugary drinks on the map, and to have extended the smoking ban to parks and beaches. He said his only regret was not paying closer attention to politics to get a better idea of what opponents were doing.

He detailed many of the stories of New Yorkers whose lives were saved in his book, Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)

Ultimately, public health should go beyond fighting pandemics, inspecting restaurants, and controlling pests, he said. It should tackle bigger problems like obesity, smoking, or designer drugs, which he said are the real challenges of the future.

“Public health needs to be in the service of dealing with modern-day stress. To do that, it needs to reinvent itself, and it needs an entirely different set of skills: communication skills, people skills, politics skills, things that are more relevant,” he said.