The documentary is part of the Literacy Campaign in the United States during and after the Civil Rights Movement. It is structured from the interview footage from 1985 film You Got To Move.
Biography:
Catherine Murphy is founder & director of The Literacy Project, a multi-media documentary project on adult literacy in the Americas. As an independent producer, Murphy's work has focused on social documentaries, producing and field producing documentaries for indy directors Matt Dillon, Saul Landau, and Eugene Corr. She subtitled Dorothy Fadiman’s Stealing America and The Greening of Cuba by Jaime Kibben. She served an archival researcher for Susanne Rostock's biography of Harry Belafonte, Sing Your Song. Her directorial debut was the documentary MAESTRA which was released in 2012 and picked up for distribution by Women Make Movies. s. “They Say I’m your Teacher” is a collaboration with Lucy Massie Phenix, and tuns the literacy lens on the United States, exploring social justice education projects and asking what more we can do to further this work in the world of today.
Lucy Phenix has been involved in making groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed social justice documentaries since 1971. Her work in documentary films grew out of her involvement against the US war in Vietnam in 1970 and out of her earlier work as a teacher and community organizer in the Civil Rights Movement in the South where she was born and raised. In Wintersoldier, the first film she helped to make with a group of New York documentary filmmakers and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lucy worked as producer and editor with the six members of Mariposa Film Group on Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, film by and for gay women and men which aired on PBS and won the DuPont Citation for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. Phenix edited The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter about working-class women working in the skilled trades during WWII and the propaganda that got them into and out of work when the war ended. She directed the documentary feature You Got to Move, about the legendary Highlander Center of New Market, Tennessee, which has been involved for almost 90 years in grassroots education for social change in the South and Appalachian region. It is a story from this film upon which They Say I’m Your Teacher is based. Lucy was Editor and Writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary about widows of the war in Vietnam, Regret to Inform, winner of a Peabody Award.
