ASHFORD, CONN.- Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217 Films announce their new film project “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age” is now available on DVD.

This is their seventh DVD release in twelve years and their sixth “essay in film” – highlighting works from what Mark Twain described as “The Gilded Age.”

Featuring the only known film footage of Mark Twain, who gave “The Gilded Age” its name, “America Rising” tells the story of how, after the Civil War, American art and American artists came into their own on the world stage. In painting, in sculpture, in architecture, and in music, America found its artistic soul and voice in the art created during the explosion of American economic growth, which Mark Twain wrote about in his novel, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.”

Using more than 90 works of art, featuring painters as diverse as Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, and John Singer Sargent, and with the great public sculpture of creative geniuses such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial” (referred to in the film by Director Maglaras as “the finest piece of memorial sculpture in America”), “America Rising” creates a portrait of a country reinventing itself, after the tragic events of the Civil War, as a major artistic force. “America Rising” shows an America poised, through its art, to commemorate its past and invent its future.

This film is currently on tour and new screening dates are being added frequently.