Flare Productions is a not-for-profit filmmaking organization founded to produce artistic, deeply-researched, lively and engaging films which can be viewed with enjoyment both by people who already know a great deal about a subject, and those who are being introduced to it for the first time. The studio is dedicated to working collaboratively to produce films and videos which cross boundaries and can be broadcast internationally as well as used in universities and schools.
Flare is run by its founder, John Fuegi, and by Jo Francis, who also co-direct the Women of Power series of films, a series of thirteen films which showcase the accomplishments of women over the last 150 years. One film in this series, They Dreamed Tomorrow, was produced in 2001 as a MITH Faculty Fellowship project wherein Fuegi and Francis produced a film, website, and DVD chronicling the contributions of Ada, Countess Lovelace (1815-1852), Lord Byron’s daughter, and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) to the early history of computing. The documentary focused on the woman for whom the United States Department of Defense named its programming language ADA and whose image Microsoft uses as its watermark. To Dream Tomorrow was featured in NEH’s Humanities magazine (January/February 2003).
John and Jo currently serve respectively as President/Treasurer and Vice President/Secretary of the Board of Directors, whose present members are Catherine Good Abbott, Ursula Daniels, Kathryn Maleney, Martha Nell Smith, and Emma Lew Thomas. Flare has worked closely with institutions such as Heidelberg, Bochum, the Bertolt Brecht Archive-Berlin, London University, the Imperial War Museum and Cambridge University. Flare co-produced project participants include: Liv Ullmann, Githa Nørby, Ian Redford, and Anna Massey.