THE FILMMAKERS
Big Charity was produced by a small, tight-knit team of three emerging filmmakers from disparate backgrounds. A muralist, a musician, and a writer, they came from D.C., Georgia, and North Carolina, and converged in New Orleans with a shared passion for storytelling. The project’s inception came during Alex’s time as director of a Boys & Girls Club in the Iberville, New Orleans’ largest housing development, where he became enamored with the empty Charity Hospital nearby and its significance to the community there. Wanting to understand what it meant to the city that each had adopted as their own, they sought to know Charity through others’ stories. This is their first feature-length documentary.
THE DIRECTOR
Alexander Glustrom graduated in 2010 from Tulane University, where he studied marketing and digital media. While at Tulane, he founded TUCAN, a student organization that brought students to work with residents of the Iberville Projects, once New Orleans' largest public housing development. TUCAN has since become one of the largest student volunteer groups at Tulane.
Alex has directed, shot, produced, and edited a wide variety of film projects ranging from commercial, music and art videos that have reached tens of thousands online, to documentaries that have been featured in film festivals across the globe. He has also created a number of fundraising videos that have raised thousands of dollars for New Orleans youth programs.