Michel Bolsey Pro

I was a schoolteacher in a Lebanese village during the 1970s and continued as a print journalist operating out of Lebanon for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Aramco Magazine, and others. In the late 1970s I spent some time in New York City, doing light design for off off Broadway stage productions. In 1980, along with Sarah Mardell, I founded and hosted the award-winning Pacifica Radio program Middle East in Focus, one of the first news programs in the United States to bring Palestinians and Israelis together around a microphone. I continued to host MEIF for ten years, and thirty-nine years later the program still airs on the Pacifica network. I also got into stop-motion, model making, and set design, working on such forgettable films as Jaws 3, Slapstick, and Creature. Three decades later, after a career in programming and network administration, I am working on my first documentary, tentatively entitled ‘In the Promised Land’, which tells the story of young refugees from Syria and Iraq trying to restart their lives in Europe in an era of increasing nativism and the rise of political populism.