It's true; Oberlin is kind to strangers

In June of 2010 a cou­ple came through Ober­lin as part of a trip through the United States film­ing a doc­u­men­tary explor­ing just how far peo­ple would go to show kind­ness to strangers.

Now, the two need a lit­tle more kind­ness from strangers to con­tinue the project.

The film, “Amer­i­can Bear: An Adven­ture In The Kind­ness Of Strangers,” is an explo­ration of Amer­ica through trust, fear, and hos­pi­tal­ity. Dur­ing the sum­mer of 2010, Sarah Sell­man and Greg Grano trav­eled the coun­try rely­ing on the kind­ness of strangers for a home each night.

Every day brought the cou­ple to a new town, where they would meet new peo­ple, and hope some­one would be gen­er­ous enough to open their home to two young strangers.

“The whole thing started after Greg spoke out in his sleep say­ing, ‘We have to go to Bear, Col­orado!’” Sell­man said.

To the dis­ap­point­ment of Grano and Sell­man, after a search they real­ized Bear, Colo., didn’t exist. Instead they found there were only five Bears in the coun­try, and they made a per­fect horse­shoe between Wash­ing­ton, Idaho, Ari­zona, Arkansas, and Delaware.

Liv­ing in New York City, the cou­ple drew a blue­print that would take them through 30 states around the coun­try in 60 days. This gave them the idea for the sec­ond part of the project; while trav­el­ing around the coun­try, they would doc­u­ment how kind peo­ple are to strangers in need.

“It started as a jour­ney with hypo­thet­i­cal faith in peo­ple, and fin­ished with real faith,” Sell­man said. “We found peo­ple in gen­eral were incred­i­bly sweet, even the peo­ple who turned us down.”

The fourth day of their jour­ney brought the cou­ple to Ober­lin, where they’d hoped to meet with pro­fes­sors at Ober­lin College.

Sell­man and Grano explored the city, sit­ting in Tap­pan Square, using the Inter­net in a cof­fee shop, and talk­ing with residents.

“We did sneak in some ice cream from Gibson’s, and my Frosted Cookie ice cream brownie hot fudge sun­dae was pretty phe­nom­e­nal,” said Grano in his blog cov­er­ing the journey.

“It was really nice,” Sell­man said of Ober­lin. “We got in later in the after­noon, which we didn’t like to do. We fol­lowed the advice peo­ple gave us, and they told us we should check out the bike co-op.”

At the Ober­lin Bike Co-op, the cou­ple met two room­mates, Stella and Peter, who offered Sell­man and Grano a place to stay the night.

After spend­ing a few more hours explor­ing what Ober­lin had to offer, the cou­ple headed over to the room­mates’ house, where they were intro­duced to a third room­mate, Becca. The five shared a meal con­sist­ing of veg­etable noo­dle soup the room­mates had made ear­lier and a half loaf of bread Sell­man and Grano had been given as a depart­ing gift from a neigh­bor at the start of their journey.

“The bread had served us won­der­fully as a daily snack, and now we could con­tribute it to a hos­pitable meal, lit­er­ally break­ing bread with our new friends.”

The trip through the coun­try con­tin­ued where the cou­ple met peo­ple rang­ing from the daugh­ter of the last war­rior woman of the Cheyenne moun­tain tribe whose grand­son is still fac­ing big­otry in South Dakota, to young friends in Mis­sis­sippi try­ing to under­stand the “coun­try” stereotype.

A car acci­dent in Arkansas cut the trip short though, but gave the cou­ple a great turn­ing point and end to the documentary.

Now, as the film is in post-production, the cou­ple is try­ing to raise money to fund the project. Sell­man said the total cost of pro­duc­tion will be around $35,000.

The pro­duc­tion team set up a page on Kickstarter.com hop­ing to raise $9,000, and dona­tions have eclipsed $10,000 so far. For more infor­ma­tion on how to donate, visit kck.st./uHYJ3s, or for more infor­ma­tion on the project visit americanbearfilm.com.

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Jan 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.