Films with a Purpose

Cora Media is an independently-financed production company based in South Florida. Our focus is to create compelling nonfiction and documentary content that examines important social, political, and economic issues. Our first feature film is InHospitable with An Elite Education (working title) to follow.

INHOSPITABLE examines the role of hospitals in our broken healthcare system and reveals how many nonprofit hospitals have become virtuous facades for corporate greed. Few are aware that nonprofit hospital executives have been systematically merging and creating monopolies all over the country and have been amassing a huge amount of political power while bleeding communities dry. In order to tell the story, we turned the lens on Pittsburgh, where the Goliath nonprofit health system, UPMC, was creating chaos for the most vulnerable patients in the region. We followed patients, hospital workers, community activists, labor leaders, journalists, and politicians – almost all of them women – who banded together to build a movement around their personal stories as they literally fought for their lives. For more on INHOSPITABLE, click here.

AN ELITE EDUCATION (working title) asks if the United States is a meritocracy by examining the connection between admissions and finances of Ivy League universities. We ask experts, college administrators and students if schools are welcoming applicants from all social strata or, in the words of Former Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman, “Opportunities in education are not equal. . . And what this is going to create in America is a different kind of aristocracy.” 

As endowments grow, how can the Ivy League expand educational opportunities? Are the communities within which they reside being improved by the presence of these school, or, as in the words of Davarian Baldwin, living in the shadow of the Ivory Tower?

This documentary will push beyond the headlines to examine how administrators navigate between the needs of students and donors to ensure that the finances of a university will be healthy “forever”. We will follow low-income students as they integrate into college life and fight for change. The film also examines the relationship between universities and the surrounding communities. Other universities will offer examples about increasing social mobility. With Covid-19 exasperating many inequities, what does the future of higher education look like, and how does it affect all of us?

TEAM MEMBERS

Ginger Gentile (Director) is an activist documentary filmmaker dedicated to addressing ignored issues and shedding light on solutions. After graduating Columbia University, Ginger lived in Argentina for 13 years where she ran San Telmo Productions, whose clients include Nat Geo, A&E, Warner Bros, and Al Gore’s Climate Challenge. Her feature directing credits include ERASING DAD (Borrando a Papá, 2014) and GOALS FOR GIRLS (Mujeres con Pelotas, 2014) which follows slum girls fighting to play a sport off limits to women in Argentina: soccer. ERASING FAMILY, premiered at Lincoln Center in 2019, exposes the trauma children suffer when a loving parent is erased by the divorce courts. Gentile was named an Architect of Change by Maria Shriver and has given talks at SXSW 2019, the Simply Parent Conference and on numerous podcasts and TV shows. 

Bianca Vargas (Production Coordinator) spent the beginning of her career creating original local content for The CW South Florida where she earned an EMMY nomination for the sex and relationship talk show GET SOME! as well as a PromaxBDA Gold Award for the program promotional spot, GET FLASHED. She recently received her MFA degree from the University of Miami where she assistant directed nine short films as well as produced seven short films including VAL, a Knight Made in MIA Official Selection as part of the Miami Film Festival. She is excited to join the Cora Media team in the documentary side of filmmaking. 

At this time, we are not accepting unsolicited materials.