“Once you meet someone and learn their story, it’s really hard to not have some kind of connection with them to want to be friends with them. I think we’ve been writing people off too quickly,” says Marie Justice. “So for us, ‘My Americana’ is about representing multiple perspectives. It is about having a lot of different opinions and voices at the table because I think the search for truth has to be found in community.”
Marie and Johnny Justice are interested in having conversations with very diverse Wisconsin people from very diverse backgrounds to find out how their lived experiences have shaped their worldviews. They are launching “My Americana,” an original and inspiring docu-series that will connect two people with completely different lived experiences to learn from each other.
“We’re so tied up in our own homogenous groups that we don’t ever get this chance to get these different perspectives, so this is a chance to bridge that gap between your social, ethnic and racial groups,” Johnny Justice tells Madison365.
Black, white, Latino, Asian. White-collar workes and blue-collar workers. Urban and rural. Conservative and progressive. The Justices will bring them together for interviews.
“There are so many different social topics where we are split and we differ in opinions. There are so many issues across the board where people differ just because of where they were raised or what they may know and what their experiences are … or the lack thereof,” Marie Justice says. “What’s different about this ‘My Americana’ project is that we are looking to represent multiple perspectives. How are we ever going to evolve as a society if we’re not willing to listen and understand one another?”
Johnny and Marie Justice founded Justice Media, whose mission is to “utilize the power of visual storytelling to drive positive social change by creating films that share individual stories and experiences that can help move society forward.” The idea for “My Americana” came to the Justices during the dual pandemic – COVID-19 and the fight for racial justice.
“The pandemic hit and collectively as a society, we’ve all been experiencing this very scary threat to our lives and everybody has been shut down,” Marie Justice says. “We’re all at different places in our lives and everybody is not experiencing the pandemic in the same way, but we still have this collective experience. Simultaneously, there is this social uprising and there’s this collective consciousness that is also evolving.
“When we started seeing these conversations pop up on social media and we started witnessing individuals who were trying to process all of this information and trying to learn about other people’s life stories and their realities, Johnny and I were like, ‘OK. we have to pivot. We have to think about how as artists we can contribute to the conversation or to society and the greater good through our art. What is the net step?’” she adds.
The next step was to create the docu-series “My Americana.” The Justices – and their Justice Media – have created a previous documentary film, “Walk a Mile in Their Shoes,” a documentary that follows five individuals facing different types of social oppression and leveraging the power of personal experiences as an educational resource.
This one is going to be a little different. For “My Americana,” the Justices went back to their roots. For the past four years, the Justices have been co-facilitating a class at Edgewood College with sociologist Sue Pastor about multiple perspectives and would use their documentary as a teaching tool.
“Sue would always say, ‘I don’t care what someone’s opinion is. I want to know how they arrived at that opinion. What is their lived experience? How did they grow up to make them feel this way?’ Marie Justice remembers. “With that, I said to Johnny that’s it’s so important that we validate people where they are and listen to them and hear them. Through sharing our respective lived experiences we can learn from one another and that’s really where the inspiration for ‘My Americana’ came from.”
Americana means something a little different for everyone.
“America is this melting pot and Americana folklore is different for every culture and group of people. And how they grew up and what that means to them and their sense of Americana,” Marie Justice says. “For me, ‘My Americana’ is two individuals from completely different backgrounds and lived experiences being able to come together and learn from one another.”
The upcoming “My Americana” series that the Justices will be producing will essentially bring two different people together from completely different backgrounds and they will bring up a subject matter to discuss.
“We will detail their stories and how they grew up and what has brought them to their opinions and how they arrived at this point in their lives and then bring them together so that they can learn from one another and grow and evolve,” Marie Justice says.
Many times after talking for a while, it turns out that people learn that they are much more the same than they would ever dream.
“For me, it’s about starting the conversations so that we can have conversations with the people that we feel are completely different from us in lived experiences, backstories, backgrounds, etc.,” Marie Justice says. “I don’t think we’re going to get very far if we’re constantly separating and creating these boxes.”
“There’s a reason why the powers-that-be want people to always be divided,” Johnny Justice adds. “Because the people have much less power that way. We want to break through that.”
The Justices have started a Kickstarter campaign for the pilot episode of “My Americana” in what they are looking to be an ongoing series for $120,000. So far, they’ve raised just over $8,000.
“That pilot episode will be so important as we get started and so we have a foundation. That’s what the Kickstarter is for. It runs until May 8. It’s an all-or-nothing campaign,” Marie Justice says.
“Most importantly, and this is something I really want to make clear, is that we are looking for $10-15 donations. This is the Bernie Sanders Kickstarter,” Marie Justice says, laughing. “We want to make sure that there is going to be a viewership there and that people are interested. The big funders are going to want to see that there is interest for this at the grassroots level.”
Ideally, the Justices will be shooting the new show in the spring and summer of 2021.
“Hopefully, we’ll be editing in the fall and will have a product by the end of the year if not by fall,” Marie Justice says. “We’re in pre-production mode right now and will be able to move into production mode during the spring and summer.
“We are really excited about this and we hope the community is, too,” she adds.
