I am pleased to announce that my MFA graduate thesis film, The Spirit of a Runner (2009), is an official selection at the 2013 Boston Running Film Festival. It will screen next weekend right before the Boston Marathon alongside a handful of other running-related films. I am very excited about this opportunity to showcase the film again; although the film is now approaching its fourth birthday (!!!), it is a project I am very proud of. While on the surface the film is a story about the 3,100-mile Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence Race, it is really a portrait of one of the most interesting, incredible, and complex human beings I have ever had the privilege of meeting: Suprabha Beckjord. Suprabha is a quiet and reserved 50-something year-old small business owner from Washington D.C. At 5'2", her diminutive size adds to an image of meekness. However, Suprabha is anything but meek. A stunning example of contrast, she is one of the top athletes in her field of ultramarathoning, having run more than 40,000 miles in races alone (excluding training!!!). Suprabha gleans her athletic inspiration from her spiritual leader, Sri Chinmoy. In fact, as one of Chinmoy's disciples, Suprabha has devoted her life to honoring him through various means, including legally changing her name in her 20s from her given name "Amy" to her spiritual name "Suprabha." In the years since I've made the film, Suprabha and I have continued to keep in touch through calls, emails and letters; most recently she sent me and my husband, Chris, a beautiful wind chime from her shop for our wedding last summer. She continues to amaze me with her balance between "regular life" (living in a city, owning a small business, keeping up with current events, etc.) and her spiritual life as a disciple of Sri Chinmoy. Please come and hear her story at the Boston Running Film Festival next weekend! I will be in attendance at the Sunday screening.
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While the last four years of freelancing have certainly honed my ability to juggle and balance multiple projects, this summer and fall have really put those skills to the test. On top of planning and hosting a wedding (my own!), I have been kept super-busy with a number of projects -- five separate clients, in fact, since I last posted here. The thing that I find most interesting is that the projects couldn't possibly be more different from one another; they include a comedy web series, corporate content for a medical records-managing company, a documentary pitch, a museum video, and a nonprofit PSA. So yeah... they've really run the gamut. Two weeks ago, I bumped elbows with fellow documentary filmmakers in Camden, Maine, at the Camden International Film Festival. It was really nice to soak in the all-doc festival atmosphere, as well as tangle with other filmmakers, both Boston-based ones and ones who had traveled far and wide to be there. I was accompanying my friends and coworkers, Jackie Mow and Laura Pacheco, to the Points North Documentary Film Forum -- a forum designed to give filmmakers a chance to pitch their projects to an "international delegation of funders" and receive valuable feedback (and potential funding connections) from industry pros. I edited a trailer to Jackie and Laura's project, East of Salinas (working title), a film they've been shooting for over a year now about a third-grade teacher in Salinas, California who teaches mostly migrant farmworker children in hopes of showing them a better path than the gang-ridden streets they know. I'll be honest in saying that my recent "busy-ness" reflects a push on my part to bring home a little more bacon in the wake of accumulated wedding bills :) But now that the wedding is over and I have a little more time on my hands, I am realizing that work is not fully satisfying my creative self, and I am itching to return to some of my own projects. Of course, there's the behemoth of a project in the film I want to make about my dad, which I have been working on here-and-there over the past three years,... but for the time-being, I have my sights on a smaller, though in some ways more daunting, ambition: a short documentary about a great personal loss I suffered when I was 22 years old. I actually began shooting for this project about a year and a half ago, and took a bit of a hiatus from it because of the wedding. I am looking forward to returning to it, which will likely happen when I travel to D.C. later this fall to shoot what I anticipate to be my final interview for the project. More on that later... In other news, some of the films I've worked on previously are getting some exposure. Lyda Kuth's Love and Other Anxieties (on which I was the Assistant Editor) is making its way through the festival circuit (click here for a list of screenings), and will be playing locally at the Coolidge Corner Theatre the week of Nov. 2-8. In addition, Garland Waller's No Way Out But One (for which I shot second camera) is making its national primetime television debut on the Documentary Channel on October 29th at 8:00 p.m. (airing again at 11:00 p.m.). Last but not least, if any fellow Bostonians are around November 7-19, check out the Boston Jewish Film Festival. I was one of the judges in the festival's short film competition :) In September, I reunited with my friend and former Producer on PBS' A Girl's Life, Jackie Mow, to collaborate on an educational doc about women's leadership, "A Seat at the Table" (2012). The film follows six high school girls who are students at Miss Hall's School in Pittsfield, MA, as they participate in a year-long class project that examines what it takes for young women to ascend to positions of leadership in their adult lives. The film starts with the basic premise that, up until the college years, girls outnumber boys when it comes to positions of leadership (Student Council, etc.) and academic success. However, after college, the numbers drastically flip, culminating in a gross underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in almost every field except for healthcare and education. The girls in the film spent a year interviewing high-profile women leaders: Senators, Congresswomen, CEOs of Fortune-500 companies, Deans of Universities, scientists, etc. Their findings were interesting and powerful, and really got me thinking... especially on questions about balancing a career with a family -- something that I anticipate will be a challenge for myself in upcoming years. The film gathered a lot of inspiration from Jennifer Siebel Newsom's Sundance doc, "Miss Representation" (2011), which is a phenomenal look at the way women are portrayed in the media. I highly recommend this film; it's really wonderful in what it sets out to do! It was somewhat challenging to edit a film that is so conceptual by nature. It required me to think outside the box, as most of the ideas that are brought up in the film cannot be visually represented in a literal way. Another challenge was dealing with the limited resources of what was essentially a high school project. We only had one camera for most of the shoots, which meant editing creatively when it came to piecing together discussion group scenes. I really had a fantastic time working on this project, though, as my coworkers and the girls themselves were a joy to be around. I hope to continue to find projects in this vein, as I love doing work that correlates with the subjects I studied as a Women's Studies major back in college. Check out the trailer for "A Seat at the Table" (2012), below: The film I worked on last year, "The Last Mountain" (2011), was recently released to DVD. I was pleased to find that several "deleted scenes" which I had edited were included as extras on the official released DVD. You can check out a few of them below: "The Air We Breathe": "Bo Webb: That's Not What I Went to Vietnam For": Sorry for being MIA these last few months. Since ending my stint with Uncommon Productions in March, I've been leap-frogging around various freelance jobs, including an indy doc about love, a corporate editing position, and a summer teaching job at Brandeis University. I'm just now starting to catch my breath after an extremely busy spring and summer. Here are a few pictures of my recent activities to help fill in the blanks... At the Boston premiere of "The Last Mountain" "THE LAST MOUNTAIN" -- In June, The Last Mountain kicked off its highly-anticipated theatrical run. It made its east-coast premiere in front a sold out crowd at the Sunshine Cinema in New York City on June 3rd. Director Bill Haney and environmentalist Bobby Kennedy, Jr. led a great Q&A session after the film. I had 16 (!!!) friends and family in attendance, which I regrettably did not get any pictures of at the screening :( Nonetheless, I was very moved by everyone's support, and very grateful for my "fans" in attendance. The highlight of the night was when my 85 year-old Aunt turned to me after the screening and said, "Your dad would've been so proud." Thanks, Edith. I'd like to think you are right! A few weeks later, the film debuted in Boston at the Kendall Square Theatre (technically in Cambridge) on June 24th. Again, I was lucky to have a bevy of friends in tow for the (once again) sold-out screening. It was great to celebrate the film with a slew of local filmmakers at the Cambridge Brewing Company after the screening! My State College "fans" in a (somewhat blurry) picture at the State Theatre I worked with our distributor to schedule a screening of the film in my hometown of State College, PA at the State Theatre during Arts Fest. The film screened for 5 days, and was attended by many friends and family (see the photographic evidence, left!). My high school friend, Adam Smeltz, wrote an excellent piece for StateCollege.com about the film. You can check it out here. Editor Lucia Small and I sit in on a recording session at Modulus Studios "LOVE & OTHER ANXIETIES" -- I spent several months this spring and summer working as the Assistant Editor on an indy doc called "Love and Other Anxieties." The film, which is veteran documentary funder Lyda Kuth's debut film, is a personal documentary that explores musings on longing, attachments, relationships, and love. I was grateful to connect with this group of very talented (mostly female) filmmakers. As I've mentioned on this site before, I have my own long-term ambitions of making a personal documentary about my father someday, so it was inspiring to be a part of the personal documentary filmmaking process. The film will hit the festival circuit this fall. Editing with a BIMA student BRANDEIS FILM PROGRAM -- In July, I taught at an intensive summer documentary film program for high school students run out of Brandeis University. The program lasted for 5 weeks, and employed an intense 6 days-per-week documentary filmmaking curriculum. I worked with my friend, filmmaker Ben Loeterman, and together we helped the kids make their final project: an 8-minute-long documentary about an orchestra-dance collaboration between the Conservatory Lab Charter School of Brighton, MA and BalletRox -- a dance school in Roxbury, MA. I was blown away by the final film the kids created, which can be viewed below. Attention those of you in the NYC area: on Monday, February 7, 2011, select scenes from "The Last Mountain" will screen at the Cooper Union in New York City. Presented by the Cooper Union Institute of Sustainable Design, the clips will be a part of a screening and panel discussion about America's struggle to balance its energy needs with environmental concerns.
The event will take place in conjunction with "Landscapes of Extraction," a photography exhibit by J. Henry Fair, whose images were incorporated into the film. The exhibit "examines the collateral damage of the fossil fuels industries" and "enables viewers to personally connect how their energy use impact the planet." The screening is serendipitous for me, as it will be held at my father's alma mater. He was very proud of being a student of the Cooper Union, and often reflected on his time there with fondness and gratitude. Click here for more information about the event. The famous Sundance marquis Last week, the Uncommon Productions team hit up Park City, Utah for the world premiere of "The Last Mountain." The film debuted at the Prospector Square Theatre on Friday, January 21, and enjoyed five subsequent screenings at various venues throughout the prestigious film festival. Following the premiere, the executive producers hosted the cast & crew of the film for a phenomenal dinner in celebration of its release, which was more than three years in the making. I was honored to meet two of the activists featured in the film: Maria Gunnoe, who has been fighting against mountaintop-removal coal mining near her homestead for years, and Antrim Caskey, the embedded journalist at Climate Ground Zero, one of the leading activist headquarters in West Virginia. KT Tunstall in concert. On Saturday night, KT Tunstall performed a benefit concert in connection with "The Last Mountain," with all proceeds going towards Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s Waterkeeper Alliance, an organization aimed at keeping the U.S. waterways clean. The concert was awesome (I love KT Tunstall!), and Bobby gave a great speech following the show, in which he outlined the importance of the issues touched upon in the film. Thus far, general reception of the film has been positive. Here is a small sampling of the reviews that have trickled in:
Two more bits of good news to come up in the wake of Sundance: New Video announced its acquisition of U.S. DVD and Digital Rights to the film. Dada Films followed closely behind, announcing their acquisition of U.S. theatrical rights to the film, which will hit theatres this summer. The plan is for the film to continue its run on the festival circuit, and then begin its theatrical run on June 3, 2011 in top-20 U.S. markets!
"The Last Mountain" will be premiering at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in a few weeks. Click here to visit the film's Sundance page, or see below for screening information. See below for an interview with director Bill Haney about the film premiering at Sundance! Check out the trailer for "The Last Mountain," newly released on iTunes Movie Trailers.
It's been a while since I last posted. Twenty-ten was a busy year for me. Since February, I have been working at Uncommon Productions in Waltham, MA, on The Last Mountain, a feature-length documentary film about the ills of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia. We recently found out that the film will be premiering at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, as one of 16 films in competition in the U.S. Documentary category. We're extremely excited about this news, and about the potential Sundance presents to catapult the film into the public eye.The Last Mountain looks at the crossroads we're at as a nation in terms of energy. Half of the energy we consume as Americans comes from coal. Yet, most of us are unaware of where that coal comes from and how it's extracted and processed. Part-Food, Inc., part-Erin Brockovich, The Last Mountain takes a critical look at the coal industry, and sheds light on what really goes down in coal country so that you and I can turn the lights on each day. As the film's Assistant Editor, I had the luxury of pouring through the hundreds of hours of footage that was shot over the last 3 1/2 years. While I am immensely proud of the Director, Producer and Editor for the final film they created, let's just say that there was enough footage to make at least three or four more films on the subject. This is a very broad issue whose tentacles run deep. As activist Maria Gunnoe (above) says, "You're connected to coal whether you realize it or not. Everybody's connected to this, and everybody's causing it, and everybody's allowing it." If you use electricity, you're linked to this film. I'll post again with screening info as it becomes available. |
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