It seems appropriate that The MacDowell Colony begin its fourth season of MacDowell Downtown — a community outreach program enabling artists-in-residence to share their work with the public — by featuring filmmaker David Petersen, whose work focuses on the idea of community and the role it plays in people’s lives.

All of Petersen’s films — from his early experimental work to his documentaries and current narrative projects — explore the potency of insular communities and the larger social issues at work within them. “My documentary work tends to center on how the members of small, tightly prescribed communities create a sense of home despite their estrangement from the outside world,” Petersen elaborates. Though the communities Petersen examines take many forms (from an area near a public sculpture to a coffee shop to a family, for example), the impact these communities have on their constituents is profound.

Take, for example, the small Evangelical church featured in Petersen’s Let the Church Say Amen (2004), a documentary he worked on during his 2002 MacDowell residency. “This church is one of the vital places that provides leadership and hope for a community trying to break free from its cycle of urban struggle,” Petersen explains. By following the lives of four parishioners for a period of one year, the film reveals how the congregation of an inner-city storefront church located in Washington, D.C., sustains its members with faith, a conviction Petersen calls “a life raft for citizens of the inner city.” Buoyed by the strong religious belief and sense of community provided by the church, these parishioners find a way to cope with the challenges of poverty, racism, and criminal persecution that are all but ignored by a government administration that sits literally just blocks away.

As part of his Downtown presentation, Petersen will show an excerpt from Let the Church Say Amen, which was a 2004 Sundance selection. The film aired on PBS earlier this year, and will be released theatrically in 2006.

He will also present part of his tentatively titled work-in-progress, Symptoms of Withdrawal, a documentary about Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s struggle to overcome a heroin addiction and make a place for himself outside the powerful circles of Washington and Hollywood — communities he was inescapably connected to as the nephew of John F. Kennedy and the son of Hollywood actor Peter Lawford.

Whether examining a community of privilege or one of destitution, Petersen’s films touch upon one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence: our yearning to belong. Petersen admits his own yearning could stem from his occupation. “Being accepted unconditionally,” he says, “is central for any artist. Being part of a community like MacDowell produces a larger community in turn; it spreads, moving outward. The Colony, the town of Peterborough, the culture at large, benefits from the work that is produced here.”

MacDowell Downtown begins its fourth season on Friday, September 2, 2005, at 7:30 p.m. at The Peterborough Historical Society. The series, which occurs the first Friday of every month from September to May, is free and open to the public. Refreshments are served. For those interested in signing up for MacDowell e-News, which includes information on upcoming MacDowell Downtowns, please visit our Web site at www.macdowellcolony.org.