Can Film Do the Job Media Used To Do?
We have seen the way the traditional media has failed the public, from the run-up to the Iraq War to the shortcomings in coverage of the Presidential election. At the same time, a crop of documentary films and alternative news sources have given us insights that have expanded our understanding of the world around us. Can film take over where traditional media has left off? Or do films serve a fundamentally different purpose? A discussion with filmmakers, journalists and experts in the field invites you to share your views on the subject.
Matthew O’Neill is a television journalist and documentary director/producer/cinematographer whose works include Baghdad ER (HBO), Alive Day Memories (HBO), Venezuela: Revolution in Progress (Discovery Times), Turkey’s Tigers (PBS) and Speak Up New York! (PBS). His programs have won three Primetime Emmy Awards, five New York Emmy Awards, a Columbia duPont Award, a Peabody Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service Television Journalism. He is based at Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV), a thriving community-media center in New York City’s Chinatown. Matt grew up on Long Island and graduated from Yale College.
Paul Stekler’s documentaries about American politics include "Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style" (broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. series), "George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire" (Emmy Award and the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); "Vote for Me: Politics in America," a four-hour documentary series about grassroots electoral politics (winner of an Emmy, a Peabody Award and a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award); and two of the Eyes on the Prize civil rights history films. Dr. Stekler was a political pollster in New Orleans and now teaches film production and politics at the University of Texas.
Danny Schechter, "The News Dissector," is a journalist, blogger, media activist, editor of Mediachannel.org and an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker. His "In Debt We Trust" was among the first to expose the subprime/subcrime crisis. He has written "Plunder," an investigation into our economic calamity, "When News Lies" and "The More You Watch the Less You Know."
From the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 80’s to the more recent fall of Tom DeLay, Birnbaum’s documentary films have probed, celebrated and exposed people to places and personalities from all over the globe. His most recent documentary, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, presents "an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned with the future of democracy. Other films have chronicled The Second Vatican Council, women trash recyclers in Ecuador, American high school kids in China, medical science, sailboat racing, and Salsa dancing.
Jim Schermbeck, along with his partner Mark Birnbaum, produced "Larry v.
Lockney," an hour long documentary for PBS in 2003 about one farmer's fight
against mandatory drug testing of his children in a small West Texas town.
They also produced "The Big Buy - Tom Delay's Stolen Congress," released
theatrically by Brave New Films in 2006 prior to the November Congressional
elections that year. Jim is a community organizer with over 25 years
of experience in Texas politics, holding staff positions with Public
Citizen, the National Toxics Campaign, and Downwinders at Risk.
