THE BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL
Anne Bogart and Holly Morris’ THE BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL, Jamie Meltzer’s FREEDOM FIGHTERS and Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber’s TOMORROW WE DISAPPEAR are the winners of the 2013 San Francisco Film Society SFFS Documentary Film Fund award. The awards totaling $100,000 support feature-length documentaries in postproduction.
Previous DFF winners include Shaul Schwarz’s NARCO CULTURA, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s AMERICAN PROMISE, which also premiered at Sundance and won the festival’s Special Jury Prize in the documentary category; and Zachary Heinzerling’s CUTIE AND THE BOXER, which won Sundance’s Directing Award for documentary, has played at film festivals worldwide and will be distributed theatrically by Radius-TWC.
2013 DOCUMENTARY FILM FUND WINNERS
THE BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL — $40,000
Anne Bogart and Holly Morris, co-director/producers
As Fukushima smolders, and the world grapples with a dangerous energy era, an unlikely human story emerges from Chernobyl to inform the debate. TheBabushkas of Chernobyl is the story of an extraordinary group of women who live in Chernobyl’s post-nuclear disaster “Dead Zone.” For more than 25 years they have survived — and even, oddly, thrived — on some of the most contaminated land on earth. For more information visit thebabushkasofchernobyl.com.
Anne Bogart is a Los Angeles-based writer and documentary director/producer. For the past 12 years she has directed and produced numerous episodes for the Globe Trekker travel series. For 15 years she worked in Paris and London as a staff writer for Women’s Wear Daily and a freelance writer for numerous American magazines including Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. While in Europe, Bogart also produced and directed documentary and entertainment programming for a variety of French and U.K. broadcasters.
Holly Morris is the writer/director/creator of the award-winning eight-part PBS documentary series about extraordinary women around the world, Adventure Divas, and author of the book Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine. Her award-winning story A Country of Women — on which The Babushkas of Chernobyl is based — was originally published in MOREmagazine, won Meredith’s “Editorial Excellence Award,” is featured in Best Travel Literature: 2013, and was republished in London’s Daily Telegraph andThe Week.
FREEDOM FIGHTERS — $20,000
Jamie Meltzer, director
FREEDOM FIGHTERS
There’s a new detective agency in Dallas, Texas, started by a group of exonerated men who have all spent decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. They call themselves the Freedom Fighters, and they’ve recently started working their first cases. For more information visit freedomfightersfilm.com.
Jamie Meltzer’s feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. They include Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broadcast, 2007), La Caminata (2009), and Informant, which won four best documentary/grand jury awards at film festivals in 2012 and is being released in theaters nationwide by Music Box Films. Meltzer teaches in the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University.
TOMORROW WE DISAPPEAR — $40,000
Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber, co-director/producers
TOMORROW WE DISAPPEAR
When their homes are illegally sold to real estate developers, the magicians, acrobats and puppeteers of Delhi’s Kathputli colony must unite — or splinter apart forever.
Jimmy Goldblum is a Brooklyn-based writer, director, and interactive producer. In 2008 he won an Emmy for “New Approaches to Documentary” for Live Hope Love, a project he produced for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Goldblum’s projects have won Emmy, FWA, Webby, and SXSW awards and have earned coverage from the New York Times, Wired magazine,USA Today, and CNN.
Adam Weber is currently editing Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Michel Gondry’s animated documentary about Noam Chomsky. He was the editor of Kanye West’s interactive film Cruel Winter, and assistant editor on Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.