Meet the director of “ The Uganda Project: A Film of Hope and Creativity,” Robert Fritz, at a free showing of this award-winning documentary on Sunday, Nov. 4 at the Harbor Theater in Boothbay Harbor.

Complimentary refreshments will be served at 4:30 p.m., followed by the film at 5. The 74-minute film will be followed by Q&A with its creator and director, Robert Fritz.

About the film: A miracle is taking place in rural, western Uganda. Kids are teaching their families how to create the lives they truly want. This results in more prosperous farms, small businesses, better homes and roads. The kids teach their families the principles of the creative process that they learn in their schools. They learn how to create and share a vision of how they want their lives to be, to contrast that vision with the lives they have now. And to use structural tension-- rather than psychological tension--to creatively think up and take the steps needed to reach that vision.

The filmmaker, Robert Fritz, mastered this creative process when studying and teaching at the Boston Conservatory of Music. As a jazz musician, he knew how to tap into creative flow to create the music he loved. But he discovered that many of his students didn't understand the creative process. So he developed a curriculum to teach it.  In the late 1970’s, Peter Senge, Robert Fritz, David Peter Stroh, and Charles F. Kiefer founded Innovation Associates, a management consulting firm. Fritz's study of music composition, along with his close contact with Senge's work at MIT in system dynamics, became a major influence for his exploration of the relationship of structure to behavior.

Enter Mwalimu Musheshe. After being critically injured in a grenade attack on his life, agronomist and rural development expert Musheshe, came to Boston to recuperate, where he met Robert Fritz and Peter Senge. He studied with them. Musheshe was already a natural systems thinker. But he and his benefactor, Silvana Veltkamp, took and applied the principles of the creative process and structural tension to integrated rural development. Musheshe's genius was to embed this learning into the schools. First into the URDT Girls School, where students master organic farming and appropriate technologies as well as the standard curriculum. Then into co-educational Community Schools throughout the area.

Musheshe also created a community radio station to educate and engage people. These teachings are now well understood by close to 1 million people in western Uganda, who use them to create sustainable, rural development. Local teens no longer have to go to large, crowded, polluted cities to find jobs and prosperity. They know how to create prosperity where they live and work, in a beautiful, lush, natural countryside.

Enjoy this inspirational movie and ask Robert Fritz questions about how to use this same approach in your life and community.