A 57-minute documentary about life on the Pine Ridge Reservation get its public television premier tonight, including showings on NET-1 and NET-HD at 9:00 pm and 12:00 am MDT.
Bridge the Gap to Pine Ridge is part of a longer series by Chris Bashinelli chronicling his journey around the world to live with communities of different cultures.
For Bridge the Gap to Pine Ridge, the 25-year old actor and director spent what he calls “two eventful weeks on the reservation, getting a taste of what it means to be a modern-day Oglala Lakota Indian.”
Bashinelli says he arrived on the reservation with a preconceived notion of a community filled with poverty and alienation, but instead found amazing stories of hope and inspiration.
Bashinelli told Native American Public Telecommunications earlier this year that he chose the Pine Ridge Reservation because “it seemed like the most famous Reservation in the United States, the one that was most talked about on the news, the one that had the most negative stories.”
He said in a “producer’s profile” that he thought the project “would be a great challenge, let’s flip this negative story on its head, let’s put a story of hope out there.”
The Bridge the Gap series has taken Bashinelli to Uganda, Tanzania, Haiti and the United Arab Emirates, locations around the world that are often negatively portrayed by the media as bleak and destitute.
He said the goal “is to entertain, educate and empower, and we do that by creating these stories of everyday life from around the world, and bringing them to life in an entertaining way.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Bashinelli is an Eagle Scout, International Speaker, documentarian, and actor who’s appeared in such diverse productions as The Sopranos and An Inconvenient Truth Special on MTV.
On the Pine Ridge Reservation, he took part in a sacred buffalo harvest and join the celebration that ended in a big bite of raw liver, worked on a farm to better understand employment, played basketball with the Oglala Lakota College women’s team, and visited with a 14-year-old girl who has devoted her life to suicide prevention.
Programs that air on NET can also be viewed online by going to the NET website at www.netNebraska.org