Who is really to blame for the American student loan crisis and how is it perpetuated?

Filmmaker Michael Camoin’s new documentary series Scared to Debt explores and reveals the depths of the American student loan crisis and the seriously flawed lending system that currently keeps borrowers in $1.8 trillion of debt. Nikki received a sneak peek at the first episode of the series. As the founder of Videos for Change, Michael has always been interested in the power of media and the arts to tell important stories and inspire collective change. In this series, viewers learn about the predatory nature of student loans and the lack of basic consumer protections that prevent borrowers from escaping the mental and financial burden of their debt.

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Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: I’m Nikki Nolan and this is Matter of Life and Debt, a show about people in the United States and their student debt. Today’s episode, Scared to Debt.

I talk with Michael Camoin. The filmmaker of the new documentary series called Scared to Debt. The first episode “Sallie Mae Not” just won the audience choice awards at the Whistleblower film festival summit.

We discussed what got him so interested in the subject matter of student debt, as well as what he has learned about the unprecedented and frankly un-American way student loans have very little consumer protections.

This is his story.

Welcome to the podcast. It is so good to have you here. We’re going to jump right into this. How did you get so interested in student debt?

Michael Camoin: By having two kids who are, in high school. One will be graduating in next year and the other one right behind her. Then I was introduced to the issue. A woman named Cynthia Pooler came to me and she said, you have to tell this story.

Michael Camoin: Somebody has to tell this story. It’s on student debt. And, you have to meet this guy, Alan Collinge. He’s written this book, the Student Launch Camp. I enjoy books on tape, and I would bike and listen. And I found myself getting angrier and angrier. So, I had to bike some more. And when I finished the book, I said, okay, I get what you’re talking about, Cynthia. Now where’s the money going to come for us to make this documentary? And she said, I’ll write the first check. And she did. I knew what was coming next and that is raising the money. From there, it was all a lot of hustling and, a lot of favors and, and a lot of donations. And I can’t afford to go into debt to help people who have, who are carrying at that time $1.5 trillion in debt. I won’t be helping the cause. So, we really needed to rely on other people to join us. And we were fortunate to be able to continue to filmmaking for five years now.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, wow. I didn’t realize it’s been such a long project. But yeah, in the time that you have started recording, the $1.5 trillion has like, it continues to balloon and grow.

Michael Camoin: It’s $1.8 [trillion].

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. And, and I heard that it might even get up to $2 trillion under Biden’s watch, which is wild if they don’t do something about it. Someone recently posted that.

Michael Camoin: No, I think that’s, that’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. It’s out of control.

One of the guys they met, through Alan, a guy named Bob Hildreth and you’ve watched the first episode, “Sallie Mae Not”. And so, Bob is this, banker, from the International Monetary Fund who describes the problem like Thelma and Louise.

He said, the students are going over the cliff. The parents are going over the cliff. Colleges are going over the cliff and Sallie Mae is going to go over the cliff. There are no brakes on the system. I didn’t know what he meant by that. No brakes. And then I discovered through Alan and others in the absence of consumer protections, that there are no brakes on this system.

Thus, the cost of college keeps rising. The cost of graduate school has no brakes. There’s no limit on what they can charge for you to get that two-year master’s degree. Even if it puts you in debt for the rest of your life.

I met another person, he actually, contacted us, Tom Bordress and he’s a Wall Street, financial fraud expert who was brought in to investigate the mortgage lending crisis in 2008. And one of my favorite lines in the movie, he says, he reminds us that if you were a banker, if you were a bank president and you lend money to people who can’t afford it in the housing industry, you could be locked up, you could be sent to jail. So, let’s go back to this premise of this lending system that has no brakes.

Michael Camoin: No one’s held responsible. The presidents of all of our colleges have no liability. The lenders have no liability. Nobody has any liability. It’s all put on the students. And like in episode 23, with Alicia, nobody asked her whether or not she could afford these loans. And so, so many people are put into this situation, and nobody, nobody told her what her interest rate was going to be. So, the more we’re now communicating with all these experts, the more you realize that yes, President Joe Biden is going to have a $2 trillion problem during his term. If things don’t change.

Nikki Nolan: I really hope they do. We just heard this week or earlier last week that they’ve extended the pause and that’s just like kicking the can down, down the street.

Michael Camoin: You’re absolutely right. I said the same thing twice. I said, okay, yep. We’re going to punt on this. Right. Kick it down the road.

Nikki Nolan: It’s really, it’s wild because we already have at least two servicers, FedLoan being one of the major servicers who has like, not even renewed their contract. And it’s just a hot mess. Somebody on a previous episode described the student debt system as being just as complicated as the tax system, but with no interface to it. No TurboTax, no nothing to interface or understand the system. And I thought that was an interesting visual for sure. It’s just so complicated.

Michael Camoin: Right. And the other thing that makes it complicated is at least for borrowers and Ralph Nader mentioned this to us when we were interviewing him at the American museum of Tort Law, which he created in Connecticut. And he says, when you’re on campus, you have the ability to organize. You have the ability to communicate with each other. As soon as you graduate a lot of those, natural ways of communicating with each other, just dissipates quickly. And maybe you have a small handful of classmates that you’re still in touch with. But very rarely do borrowers share their stories because they’re, embarrassed, ashamed. And that’s why I so support what you’re doing here, because this is a place where people can realize that they’re not alone and it wasn’t them. It’s not their fault. The system knew what it was doing, and it was glad that you didn’t ask any questions so that they can make money.

Nikki Nolan: So much money, they’re making so much money. Like I think like I ended up paying 60% more. Then the amount that I took out and, and some people I’ve talked they took out $40,000, they paid back $170,000. Like it’s, that’s compounding interest and all these things that they don’t want you to know, like the less you pay, the more they make. The system is really set up for so many people to stay indebted revolvers. Andrew Ross was on my show, and he was explaining what a revolver is, which are people who are just constantly in debt, so that you can constantly make money off of people. And it’s just like, we’re creating the system because of student debt and the rising cost of everything else. Which keeps people, enslaved to the system.

Michael Camoin: It’s no way as, as people say, it’s no way- Ralph Nader would say this, if he were here-this is how we’re bringing up the next generation in America by enslaving them, wince, strapping them with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. There is no country that does this. There’s no other country that does this.

Although the UK is now adopting our plan and they’re starting to see similar results. So, we’re exporting this predatory lending system to the UK. What a shame.

I wanted to say one thing. When Alan Collinge introduced me to a good friend of his and they were right there on the key in the film, we go to Syracuse, New York and he introduces me to a guy named Bob Chrysler. And Bob has been paying religiously month after month, $155. And he realizes after 44, 48 straight payments that the total never goes down. And I’m thinking about myself and my wife. If we ever got into a mortgage like that, where for four years, we never saw the total of our mortgage go down. We should have run away from that mortgage.

We should never be involved in that mortgage. That is like, not the way to buy a house. Why is it okay to fund college that way? Why is it okay to add all that interest in there? And, and, and, and many other, really bad practices of lending that are just so predatory to young people who have no clue. And don’t you love it when people say, well, everybody knew better. How would they know better? Nobody ever gave them any financial advice. The colleges never gave them financial advice. They should be held accountable.

Nikki Nolan: I agree. I don’t know how we’re going to hold them accountable. We just need a whole new system where college is free and all the debt is gone, but I don’t know how likely we are to get there.

Michael Camoin: I, happened to listen to Josh Mitchell’s book, The Debt Trap, he’s a Wall Street Journal reporter, and I’m going to give away the ending. But one of his solutions, which I think is really noteworthy and worth exploring, and that is, and this is this doesn’t have to do with canceling student loans.

This doesn’t have to do with free college. But to make the colleges accountable, let them hold the loans. They become the bank, which they are, they just don’t have any fiduciary responsibilities and they could care less. They could raise the rates a thousand dollars a year. They can raise interest. And it doesn’t matter because you’re going to come through there and you’re going to go, and we got the next people coming in behind you.

So, get out of the way, but make the colleges hold the loans. Now, what does that do? It holds them accountable for putting you in a degree that then either they have to also help you find a job, because if you can’t pay back the loan, the college loses. Not the whole country. People don’t know really what they’re going to do with their lives when they go to college. There’s only a handful that really know that what they’re doing, and they go out and do it. But even after school, after college, you change your career five or six times over the course of your lifetime. So knowing all of those things, how can college be set up such that people can succeed afterwards? Whatever they, whatever discipline they’ve chosen, make it affordable. Why is it so unaffordable?

Nikki Nolan: With doing this film, what is now been the impact of student debt on you and your perspective?

Michael Camoin: Well, I really appreciate you asking that question. The impact on me is one emotionally where I’m like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do about this? What can I do about this now that I know this? And the answer I have is, let me tell the other five chapters, five episodes of this series, Scared to Debt. Because I believe when parents realize, and they’ve watched this program, that they spent their life savings. Like I had a, a recent person doing an interview with a dental specialist and her son just completed school. And he says to her, well, that was a waste of a quarter of a million dollars. If college students have that much awareness, I hope that parents realize that they’ve been saving, since their kids have been born to put them through college, but they, they gave their inheritance to a system that just pocketed the money. It didn’t necessarily make their child better off. And when they realized that, and they realized that the presidents of public and private universities are making over a million dollars and then their senior vice presidents and administrators are making a million dollars or $750,000. The President of the United States makes $400,000 a year. Why should publicly service funded colleges, whether private or public make more? It’s not like they have a bigger budget to manage than the President of the United States? So why, why is that allowed? Because it is. And that was part of how this was designed by a gentlemen named Albert Lord, who, as you see in the documentary, when he retired, built himself a private golf course. What government employee gets to build their own private golf course after they’re done. I mean, President Trump had his own golf courses beforehand, but-

And they may be coming to take one of those golf courses away, based on what he might owe. And, and is $750 in taxes that he paid by the way, which many of us paid more than that.

Nikki Nolan: So much more. I pay so much more.

Michael Camoin: Why is it that the President of United States could file for bankruptcy six times and students who invested in themselves cannot? Again, that’s those are the missing, that’s where the breaks are missing. And that’s what makes the playing field level. And when you bring Alan Collinge on, he will tell you more about those things. Like absence of bankruptcy, statute of limitations, fair lending laws. Which means everybody holds a stake in the game. The government, the lender, the student, the university.

And right now, it’s all on the student. And that’s just not a good lesson, not a fair lending system.

Nikki Nolan: You started off because you realized that your children are about to go to school. And it was like, oh my God, this is a huge problem. Has anything changed about you, in relationship to your children going to college?

Michael Camoin: So, my daughter is looking at International Studies and we just went to Washington DC, earlier this summer. And she visited four schools. And she’s looking at the campus and the programs and the internships. And I google the school and the president, I find out that George Washington University, the president makes $1.5 million.

His senior staff make a million. He’s got five people at $750,000. He’s got four people at $500,000; he’s got five people at $400,000; he’s got five more people at $300,000. And he’s got two people at $200,000. And I’m like, I got to tell you, this is how much this is where the, this is where the tuition is going in this college.

So, take a look at that. But Georgetown University, American University, even Catholic University, all presidents make over a million dollars. So, so here’s what, here’s my thinking behind this. And its sort of my, maybe you call it conspiracy, but here’s what it takes to get an internship in Washington, DC today is a $70,000 to $75,000 a year bachelor’s degree. That’s how you get into our federal government. Because these colleges hold some of the best internships into our government. What percentage of our population will really be able to become part of our government? If the price tag is $280,000 after four years. So, I that’s the way my brain is thinking and to her credit, she is not. Cause we talk about this. She is not caught up in prestige. But I think she’ll make a financial decision. But it, it scares me if we ever have to sign onto these student loans. So, I’m paying attention closely to the US Senate hearings, led by Dick Durbin Tuesday, August 3rd, which would restore bankruptcy protections. Which at least if you’re floundering after 10 years, you could file for that.

And nobody really wants to file for that because then you can’t buy a house and you can’t do these other things. Which millions of student borrowers can’t buy anyway right now, because of their student loans? That debt, disallows you, disqualifies you, and that holds back the housing market that holds back family. And you look at the birth rate in this country, it’s declining every year. People are not getting married. And one of the reasons why they’re not getting married because of their student loans.

Nikki Nolan: So, I feel like this is a good point to ask, like, what is your story? How did you get so involved with this documentary series?

Michael Camoin: I launched my company Videos for Change Productions shortly after I graduated with a master’s in social welfare. And this was just before streaming media was coming into place. In fact, I, I remember putting my first video up on streaming in 1995.

And you remember the internet, how clunky it was but I, I felt that the power of telling stories could create change and if done right, could move people to take action. And when this project came along, and the choice became whether or not to explore it or not. I, I knew from experience that it would take a couple of years to, finish telling the story.

And here we are in year five.

When we first started Videos for Change, we came up with a motto and that is to create customized communications designed to impact audiences around the globe. And I remember having this motto, and so it was about finding subjects and topics that, if you could tell those stories could create greater awareness. And a shift in people’s perspective of, what they held to be true. And everywhere at that time when this subject on student loans was being introduced, the media at that time was, this is a bad borrower problem. We didn’t have the stories we have now, five years ago, a lot has changed. So, the momentum started to pick up and, there’s a shift, but there’s still a need to raise awareness because many people still believe that this is a bad borrower problem.

And until we tell the story of what borrowers are trying to do to help themselves and what forces are acting against them. And how the cards are stacked, not in their favor, the average person will not understand why America has $1.8 trillion until they understand that this is a failed lending system. That has harmed people’s lives and their livelihoods and their family members.

Nikki Nolan: So, it started with you talking with Alan.

Michael Camoin: Once we had the green light to begin, in a documentary, you start by creating a demo, a three-minute demo and we shot Alan. It’s just really fascinating cause I sat Alan down and it took us two days for him to tell us everything he knew. I wanted to know his personal journey. And the question that I asked him, I said, how did you know that there was a problem? Because here’s a guy with three degrees in aerospace science out of USC. And he can’t find work in his line of work. And that’s when he, he goes into telling me his story about how he discovered the absence of consumer protections from student loans.

He goes back home to Tacoma, Washington, and he gets a federal job through the Department of Transportation. And it for him, he becomes, intermediary to help small businesses learn to apply for federal jobs and opportunities. And that’s where the federal government, you, you can’t give, a big job to a small company. They can’t afford to take that on. So, they have to take out a loan. So, the government has a part of that responsibility. The bank has part of that responsibility, and the small business has that responsibility. And it was there that he learned about fair lending. Then his loans get thrown into default and, and he starts to investigate why this is so. And through his job they sent him back to Washington, D C, where he takes, trainings to better do his job back in Tacoma, Washington. And it was there that he starts to knock on doors of Hillary Clinton, and, and stretch the, hey, are you guys aware of this issue? And he was able to get traction, and he gets Bethany McClain to write a story in 2005. And then he’s on 60 Minutes in 2006. So, our demo was how do we start to raise, awareness about what this story is going to be about?

And, gosh, how did we pull it together? We, we drove to Boston. I wanted to interview the people of Beacon Press, who published his book. And I wanted to find out why did they publish his book? And then while we’re in Boston, we interviewed Bob Hildreth who is with the international monetary fund and sits on the board of think it’s Boston University. He’s graduated from Harvard. Very well-spoken. There’s a woman that Alan keeps talking about.

Her name is Catherine Fitts. She was on the board of Sallie Mae. She lives in Tennessee, so it took us 18 hours to drive to Tennessee. So, we had to schedule that one. I think it was in 2018 that we went, but I knew it wasn’t going to be an important, important interview, because what happened to her life?

I mean, she goes from Wall Street being on the board of Sallie Mae in the early nineties. Before all the breaks are removed, but the writing was on the wall in terms of where this thing was heading. And she’s the only person who, we were able to talk to from inside Sallie Mae. So that was like, now we’re like, wow, we’re sitting on information that nobody knows firsthand.

And, and that’s part of what’s going to be coming out in the subsequent episodes. But, in the first episode she appears and, she makes these statements, like, I don’t know why anybody is still taking out student loans. The mafia gives you better odds, on lending money to you. And this is from somebody who’s inside and it really, and it only got worse under Trump.

And you’re juggling this low-budget effort with this trillion-dollar problem. But we traveled to Boston. We traveled to New York. We traveled to Washington, DC where they host a protest with the Debt Ball. We traveled to Tennessee. While we’re in Washington, DC. I get to meet another colleague of Alan named John Oberg. Now, John is a New York Times whistleblower. He was an insider on the Department of Education who discovered that the lenders were overbilling the federal government by a billion dollars. And it took two days to interview John.

People don’t want to hear from the whistleblower. They can easily find reasons to dismiss whatever they’re saying. Like, hey, why can’t you pay on your student loans? Are you a deadbeat? You’re just milking the system and people don’t understand the system. So that’s where, Videos for Change, hopefully, can come in and shed some light on the fact on some other facts that aren’t being reported.

It’s too complicated to tell in a two-minute news story. It’s way too complicated. And until people get the bigger picture, as Bob Hildreth says, universities are going to go over the cliff. Where are you going to, where are you going to find thousands of students who can all pay $50,000, $60,000, $80,000 or a $100,000 a year? You’re going to have to get foreign kids, to come in, whose parents can pay in cash.

And that’s a finite amount of people. So, in the documentary, I don’t know if you remember the scene- and we spent a lot of time, I went through three animators, maybe four to get, and it’s not exactly where I want it, but it’s close. But that scene where Bob is talking about, colleges are like on surfboards and, it’s, it’s the waves of student loans that goes higher and higher.

And then they’re way up here and they find themselves on a cliff. And then the tide’s going to go out. And they don’t know how to get down. They don’t know how to get down from a hundred thousand dollars a year because it’s been, they just keep going up. And I just love that animation because for the first time it explains a very complicated situation that colleges are in.

They don’t know how to get down off of this.

And everyone’s worst fear is going to come true. They’re not going to fix this. Until they absolutely have to. And one of the things that Matt Taibbi shares with us is because you need to understand that these loans are like soy in food. They’ve been woven. Good loans and bad loans have been woven in with other loans and repackaged and put out to market and resold.

So, you can never pull out the bad loans with what they needed to do with the mortgage lending crisis. So, these things are all bundled in there. And now that we’re in the pandemic, post-pandemic, the, before the post-pandemic bookings put out Brooks Institute put out a study that 40% of borrowers were in default and now post-pandemic, Alan will say, it’s closer to, I think some people are saying it’s 60%.

Alan says it’s closer to 80% that these loans are either in forbearance or default and may never get paid off.

Nikki Nolan: It seems like you’re just sort of like going from story to story, to story and just realizing how large and interwoven student loans is within the society.

Michael Camoin: Well, you don’t know in a documentary when to stop filming, but you have to, at some point. And the pandemic kind of gave us that answer with everything being shut down. Now I was able to take unemployment funds and put that towards the documentary. And people don’t understand in the art world, it’s really hard to be successful in grants. So that was like a grant and that, allowed me to hire an editor named Tracy Crank and together with her husband, John, they began to sift through this footage and take my notes.

I sat down and took a look at a three-page, kind of an executive summary of Alan’s story that I created in 2017. After I sat down with Alan, for those two days, I said, okay, this is, this is where he’s gone. From around 1999 or 2000, landing on 60 minutes, publishes his book I think in 2009. He’s part of Occupy in 2011. And here he is pushing for a bankruptcy reform and, and that’s kind of like the baseline of his fight to restore consumer protections.

And then we started weaving all these other interviews and, before, before I could really give the green light to my editors, I had to break it up. And I broke up that three-page executive summary into six chapters.

So, episode one, “Sallie Mae Not” answers we hope the question of whether or not this a bad borrower problem? Or is this a bad lending problem? And episode two, we’re going to drill down deeper with, John Ober. He was one of their early whistleblowers who discovered that the lenders like FIA and others that have recently shut down. They were over-billing, the federal government in the form of a billion dollars. And when he discovered this, his higher ups told them to put that down. So, after he retired, he then further investigated the problem and was able to bring upon nine lawsuits and won seven out of nine times, which is unheard of in whistleblower cases. And often what happens with whistleblowers is their life gets ruined. For many reasons, we need whistleblowers, but then, society turns on them because there’s a lot of people who are benefiting from the illicit action. In this case, it was overcharging the federal government and he got the lenders to repay.

Now, Betsy Devos spent millions of dollars against him to get those companies. And that’s how he lost the last two cases.

Nikki Nolan: Wow.

Michael Camoin: Doesn’t that say volumes about this? How messed up this is. Like, who really is looking after the borrowers?

So, after the whistleblower episode two, we’re going to go right now into Wall Street and understand the role they played and how this compares to the mortgage lending crisis. And what’s different in the student loan debt crisis. And then fourth, we’re going to look at colleges and we talked a bit about that, just how they don’t have any liability.

And they have this ability, particularly in graduate programs to just raise their rates beyond market value. Like I was told recently that, you graduated from dental school, at $280,000 a year.

That’s outrageous.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Michael Camoin: Episode five is where now it’s called “Torts, Vets and Suicide”. And that looks at, where are we going to put all these stories? This, this burden that, students are carrying and we’re like, we’re going to create an episode. It’ll be hopefully not, but it is depressing, but hopefully there we are weaving in solutions, at least allowing borrowers to feel heard so that they realize they’re not alone and suicide does not have to be the answer to this.

Episode six then goes to solutions. And one of those solutions that is hinted at in episode one is Slexit. Student loan exit. Alan raises the question, has the country ever had a massive debt revolt and just walked away and that’s on the table. And it should be on the table. This is like going back to the founding of the country of when, the, the king of England lorded it over and, and was going to help people, tax them, an insane amount.

And so, they, they threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor, which brings us back to that first, that instinct of I wanted to go to Boston, to, interview Beacon Press. And their office is right around the corner from Boston Harbor. And so, it all lined up and that’s been on Alan’s mind, it’s a last resort.

No one’s trying to get over on the school. They just want to pay a fair amount. As many of your guests have reported, they’ve already paid the principal. What, what’s a fair interest rate? It’s not what they’re looking at.

It’s not a hundred percent. That is, that’s a loan shark.

And so, in 16 short years you saw college skyrocket. Now here’s an interesting thing that I learned and I, I hope I got it correctly from Josh Mitchell’s book, Debt Trap. They created private loans to meet the 90/10 rule. The 90/10 rule is such that you had 90% in federal loans. You had to go and get 10% of your tuition from somewhere else. So, they created private loans. They’re non-government loans, but they could control the interest rate on that without informing you, they could charge you fees on those private loans. And that’s how they got around putting you into a house you couldn’t afford, basically a student, a degree that you couldn’t afford.

So, you and others, and people we’ve interviewed signed on to those private loans. And not even on the table right now for returning consumer protections. They want to make more money and they will figure it out. And they have until Congress puts the brakes on this system. And I mean, look at the cost of college. I mean, that’s the real thing that unites, I think people right left and center is that why does college costs this much? And can you really pay back these loans? Can, I mean, can that degree pay back this loan? So, what’s really interesting for the first time in this country. Again, Josh Mitchell points out is that the debt isn’t just transferred to the borrower, but now it’s transferred on up to the parent and into their retirement.

So, it’s going in a reverse direction and that can only hurt the economy. And Alan will remind your listeners when he comes on, that this is exactly what the founding fathers wanted to prevent when they put in, a uniform system of bankruptcy in the U.S. Constitution. So, to remove that from these student loans is the beginning of the downfall of this whole lending system.

Nikki Nolan: So, we’re coming to the end. Is there anything that I didn’t talk about that you want to talk about?

All students need to take action. And they need to know whether or not the president of their university has got their back. I haven’t heard one president speak out about the absence of consumer protections on these loans. And there’s a reason for that. So, we can only gather, they’d been told not to speak. And I’ve had professors actually tell me that much that, oh, we’re not supposed to talk about that. So, students really have to, again, your program here is supportive of borrowers and hopefully they can feel empowered to take action. So, we’re at the end. Is there anything that you want to promote?

Michael Camoin: Sure, I’d love to promote and encourage people to come to visit us at www.scaredtodebtmovie.com. They can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Everybody can do something if people can contribute a cup of coffee, 10 bucks, 20 bucks to the documentary because we want to show all six episodes. And even if they can’t contribute to that, they can, they can share a tweet. They can share some of the videos. We want to wrestle this lending system to the ground.

We’re actually giving clips from the documentary away so that we can let people in. And these are some of the juiciest moments, but we want people to know about this lending system now, and now’s the time during this extended more moratorium on student loans for us to help parents and students, and families raise awareness, and to be informed and take action.

Write a letter. Write a letter to your college president. Ask them what are they doing to help the situation? And could they stop being quiet about it? They’re the ones who created it. So, people can go to scaredtodebtmovie.com.

Nikki Nolan: If people wanted to see your film, how might they, is it just going to your website, and following you on Twitter to figure out where its screenings are happening? Or is there more of a goal to eventually get it completely out there with distribution and stuff?

Michael Camoin: There is a goal to achieve distribution. So, all rights are available. Our next stop is the Morehouse college human rights film festival in September. We’re in communications with other universities to host screenings. And there’s a handful of film festivals that we hope choose our film this fall.

But if folks really want to put together a group and host a screening, we’d be happy to talk about how to do that. And with virtual technology, that’s not out of the question anymore, right? They can, find me and others, contact us through our website at www.scaredtodebtmovie.com.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. It’s so great talking with you.

Michael Camoin: Nikki, thank you for the opportunity. And keep up the great work.

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