When the original film was produced in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2019, the city had just witnessed a rash of community shootings and police inspired anger. At the movie screening, affected families and one of the attending police officers embraced while a stunned, tearful crowd looked on. Healing started at that moment but the families standing before the audience clearly appeared solemn and braced for the long road ahead.
Always Hope is born of a deep desire to address the ‘fatigue of our country’, part of which is due to an escalation of community and police violence in many U.S. cities.
Who will be there for these families, after the blaring lights of media attention and initial public expressions of sympathy and loss fade into yesterday’s news? Always Hope will be there.
In 2020, the entire world was involuntary pushed into the era of the ‘pandemic’. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 375,000 died and COVID19 became the necessary obsession of our country. The stewpot of rising political and economic pressures erupted and police violence ignited another round of community depression and community members turned on each other.
We crawled to the other side of the pandemic, but many Americans remain downcast, uncertain and fearful about our future. The political divide created over mandatory vaccinations, and concerns about new variants are on the rise.2
The second installment in the Always Hope series in Always Hope Dallas (AHD) filmed on location in Dallas, Texas.
Dallas is the ninth largest city in the U.S. and the third largest in Texas with a population of 1.28 million. The total population of the Dallas-Fort Worth Arlington MSA totals 6.954 million.