Lesley University

Alice Dungan Bouvrie '02

Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences

In the mid-1980s, Alice Dungan Bouvrie came to her fork in life: she had to choose between money and time. Bouvrie opted out of television and big-picture filmmaking and chased after her dream of creating documentary films." I was trying to raise a family, and wasn't home a lot," she said." When I began working on documentary films, my quality of life improved."

It was no accident that Alice, who already had a master's degree in film production from Boston University, ended up at Lesley. She was looking for a program that would add dimension to her filmmaking. She looked at international relations programs, but found that "the focus is really on politics and economics. Intercultural Relations [at Lesley] is quite different. It focuses on sociology and the humanities," she said.

In the intervening years, Alice has become an accomplished documentarian with a distinctive style. In Iditarod… A Far Distant Place she explores the lives and motivations of three dog-sled racers competing in Alaska's renown long distance race: a Yupiik Eskimo who raced for sobriety; a 48-year-old grandmother; and a man determined to "place in the money." Audiences were charmed by the film and, in 2000, "Iditarod" earned honors for Best Cinematography at the New England Film Festival and a First Place Audience Award at the Film Fest in New Haven, Connecticut.

Alice's probing of cultural influences have become a trademark of her company, Mineral King Productions. For her recently completed documentary, Prison Pups (2006), she spent two years following inmates at a minimum security prison in Concord, Massachusetts, who raise and train puppies as assistance dogs. The film won Best Documentary at the Berks County Film Festival, First Place Audience Award at the Asheville Film Festival, and Best Made-in-Mass and Best Featurette at the Plymouth International Film Festival. Her co-production, Living Under the Cloud: Chernobyl Today won the Special Jury Award at the 1994 San Francisco International Film Festival. Her current work-in-progress, Ordainable, follows a male-to-female transsexual in her journey to ordination in the Presbyterian Church.

This profile was compiled from previously published sources: Lesley Today editions: Feb. 6, 2002 and March 15, 2000, and Lesley Magazine, Spring 2007.