Chris Ivey strives to move people to action with his art.

He doesn't have an ax to grind, he says, just truths to tell -- complicated, multifaceted truths.

On a recent Tuesday night, Ivey walks into a large Kingsley Association meeting room in Larimer, hugging and shaking hands with friends and associates as he sets up his Panasonic DVCPro HD P2 camera and tripod.

He's shooting footage for the third installment of his "East of Liberty" documentary series examining the ramifications of redevelopment in the East Liberty area.

The first installment, "A Story of Good Intentions," debuted in 2006 and focused on residents displaced from the East Mall, Liberty Park and Penn Circle subsidized housing apartments, but included interviews with former city officials, community activists and neighborhood businesses.

The second installment, "The Fear of Us," premiered in February and explores class, race and redevelopment from the perspective of the business community and residents. It will be screened Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the parking lot of Lincoln Elementary School.

On this night, Ivey -- wearing olive cargo pants and an FC Barcelona Ronaldinho soccer jersey -- prowls the meeting room with his headphones, camera and microphone. He's capturing residents' conversations with Carnegie Mellon University architecture students who are developing design plans for the neighborhood.

He describes his work as edgy.

"I think that's good," says Ivey, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Squirrel Hill, whose eyes disappear when he smiles. "Some people think it's not."

Maelene Myers, executive director of East Liberty Development Inc., has been deeply involved in neighborhood redevelopment efforts and thinks the documentaries have been one-sided.

"We're not causing harm to communities," Ms. Myers said. "You have to uproot people and move them, but in the end, it's a better neighborhood and community for everyone."

He doesn't consider his work one-sided.

"Everyone needs to have their voice heard," says Ivey, who often gives people an affirming single or double thumbs up followed by a staccato "Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah." "You're not going to agree with everybody, but everybody has to be heard for dialogue to start."

His biggest frustration is getting people to open up. Some who talked with him for the first documentary declined to be interviewed for the second.

"He's very frenetic, incredibly modest and yet, outspoken," says Rami el Samahy, a friend and adjunct assistant professor in CMU's architecture school who wanted his students to see Ivey's documentaries.

"I don't think he's trying to make anyone look like a liar or a fool in the documentaries. Sometimes there are valid, but competing and diametrically opposing, views."

Ivey grew up in Monroe, N.C., which he wryly points out is the hometown of the late Sen. Jesse Helms Jr. and half of the R&B group Jodeci. He comes from a working-class family, and he recalls that a Pittsburgh blogger assumed he was a rich, Jewish guy from Squirrel Hill and wondered why he was making documentaries about East Liberty.

"Does he have white guilt?" the blogger asked in a post.

Ivey laughs when he tells the story. He's just a black man who always has wanted to be a filmmaker. Right after high school, where his grades weren't the greatest, he learned he had attention deficit disorder. The diagnosis came as a relief, he says, because he had always just thought of himself as a failure. He considered entering the military but instead studied computers and engineering at community colleges and technical schools in North Carolina.

"I flunked all my classes but won a writing contest," he says.

As a kid, he'd write his own comic book stories and amuse his friends with them. He decided to move to Pittsburgh in 1995 to study at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. His short film, "The Power of A Smile," won an honorable mention that same year in the JVC Tokyo Video Festival.

Finding a film job in Pittsburgh wasn't easy in the late '90s. "Kids with no training would get jobs before me," he said. "It was almost impossible to get a job on a movie, and I didn't get to direct until 2000."

The experience forced him to be more creative about getting a film made. "I kind of got in the habit of doing everything myself, like Robert Rodriguez," he says.

He also started shooting stylized and cinematic commercials just to pay the bills. He did an award-winning commercial for Jones Soda that was a parody of "Super Fly."

"We shot it on no budget, like the catering budget [$2,000 to $3,000]," he says, stopping momentarily to read a text message.

He's also made music videos and, the past two years, he has done camerawork for Diversity Films for a PBS documentary about the effect of AIDS on the African-American community.

Malik Bankston, executive director of the Kingsley Association, finds Ivey's work to be provocative, even though some consider it controversial.

"I happen to like [his work], even when I don't always agree with it," Mr. Bankston says. "The stories and issues that he's concentrating on are constantly evolving and it moves in different directions and there is never one story, but lots of stories."

Ivey, who is single, has used his own money and foundation grants to continue his "East of Liberty" project. He is trying to raise funds for the third installment, which will follow residents displaced after the demolition of the high rises to see where they landed. A fourth documentary will focus on youth culture and violence.

"There's still so much to be addressed," he says later, in between sips of Maudite beer and bites of smoky, crispy bacon at Bacon Night at the Harris Grill in Shadyside.

He also is working on a jazz documentary and a full-length feature film about Pittsburgh paramedics. A decade from now he envisions himself making full-length feature films and splitting his time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

"I really like filming here," he says. "It's easier to get access to locations, and the film community [now] is like family."

But he'll never lose his edge.

"People have to learn to talk about stuff and address it," Ivey says. "If I wasn't telling these stories, nobody else would." .. --> Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette Filmmaker Chris Ivey makes a video of Carnegie Mellon University's Urban Lab community meeting at the Kingsley Association. -->