The Believers, a film codirected by Clayton Brown (MFA, Northwestern University), won Best Documentary at the 2013 Maryland International Film Festival. The film previously won the Gold Hugo for documentary at the 2012 Chicago International Film Festival and was nominated for best current-issue documentary at the Doc Miami International Film Festival in 2012. Brown’s Galileo’s Grave also won the award for best short film at the East Lansing Film Festival in 2012.

The Beautiful Dark, a play by Erik Gernand (MFA, Northwestern University), had a run this summer at Redtwist Theatre in Chicago as part of the theatre’s 2013 season. Gernand also participated in The Storefront Playwright Project (pictured), which took place during the month of July in downtown Chicago.

The documentary Where Soldiers Come From, which Kyle Henry edited and Heather Courtney (GJ89) directed, won a News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story. It is available on iTunes and Netflix. The PBS/ITVS documentary that Henry edited last year, Before You Know It, was screened at NYC’s Lincoln Center’s FilmLinc theater as part of its Art of the Real series. In addition, Kyle's feature Fourplay toured theaters nationwide in Spring 2013 as is now available via Amazon and TLA Releasing.

Shown right: RTVF assistant professor Kyle Henry edits director and Northwestern grad Heather Courtney’s Where Soldiers Come From at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit and Story Lab. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute by Fred Hayes.

Eric Patrick’s Retrocognition, an animated collage of photographs and audio fragments from WWII-era radio dramas, has accumulated considerable recognition and praise in the film world, including Best Experimental Film at the Humboldt Film Festival, the Da Vinci Film Festival, the IFS Independent Filmmakers Showcase, and the Tolfa Short Film Festival in Italy; the Pablo Koontz Best Experimental Technique Award at Humboldt Film Festival; the Aloha Accolade Award at the Honolulu Film Awards; the New View Award for Best Experimental Film at the River Bend Film Festival; the Royal Reel Award in Animation at the Canada International Film Festival; Best Animated Film at the Victoria Independent Film Festival and the Cape Fear Independent Film Festival; Best of Festival for Animated Short at the Richmond Film Festival; 1st Place in Animation at the Twin Rivers Media Festival; and the Jury Special Recognition Award at the Cinema at the Edge.

An exhibit by faculty member Ozge Samanci, Word 6- An Architecture of Multi-Modal Poetry/Text, was presented at Columbia College Chicago this winter. In the exhibit, “writers of all genres explore the strangeness of dwelling in a foreign space by examining poetry and text as part of a greater structure.” Samanci’s interactive installation Sneaky Time was invited to Athens, Greece, for the New Media Festival and was exhibited at the Media Arts Biennial in Wrocla, Poland, in May. Samanci was also invited to contribute to Infinite Corpse, a collaborative comics project involving leading comics artists.

Our Longest Drive, a documentary by Martin Rodahl (C08), premiered at the Gene Siskel Theatre in Chicago in 2012. NBC/Universal and the Golf Channel have picked up Our Longest Drive for a six-episode miniseries, and the first episode aired on October 16 at 9:30 pm central on the Golf Channel. Rodahl also produced Speechless, an award-winning PSA for the Special Olympics.

Language of the Unheard, a film directed by Jacqueline Reyno (C11) and Matthew Litwiller (C11), focuses on political and cultural issues plaguing the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The film has been accepted to festivals around the country and beyond—including the 2012 Cannes Short Film Corner in France, where it took top documentary honors in the American Pavilion Student Filmmaker Showcase. Director of photography and coproducer Travis LaBella (C11) also won the Student Heritage Award for documentary from the American Society of Cinematographers.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded the film Living Revolution a $75,000 production grant. Two-time Peabody Award-winning director-producer Maria Finitzo (GC08) will use the funding to further explore the recent Bolivian “revolution” during the presidency of Evo Morales through the experiences of indigenous leaders, women’s rights activists, politicians, opposition intellectuals and the Tsimané, a group of indigenous people who live in the lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon.

Paramount has hired former IFC Films acquisitions director Jeff Deutchman (C05) to serve as director of acquisitions for Paramount Home Media Distribution, effectively launching a new division at the studio for acquiring and releasing independent films from the festival circuit. Deutchman is the filmmaker behind 11/4/08, the documentary that covered election day the year President Barack Obama first won office.

Alvelyn Sanders (C90) wrote, directed, and produced Foot Soldiers: Class of 1964, which premiered on Atlanta’s PBS television station. The documentary tells the story of the young women of Spelman College’s class of 1964, who participated in the largest coordinated series of civil rights protests in Atlanta’s history. Mark Kendall (C09) was the film’s videographer.

Lotti Pharriss Knowles (C92) coproduced Vito, a feature documentary about LGBT civil rights activist Vito Russo, which played film festivals such as New York, Palm Springs, Berlinale, and Frameline and premiered on HBO in 2012.

Jake Abraham (C96) and Daniel Laikind (C96) produced the National Geographic documentary series Amish: Out of Order. The series ran for 10 episodes during 2012. Abraham’s other work includes the TV documentary Commander in Chief: Inside the Oval Office – Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012), on which he served as a co-executive producer. He also produced the movies Lovely By Surprise, Sorry, Haters, and Lonesome Jim, among others. Laikind has helped produce a number of TV documentaries, including Tent City, U.S.A., Unraveled, No One Dies in Lily Dale, and Inside Night Shift: Repo Men. 

Margaret Nagle (C83) won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Show for Boardwalk Empire in 2011.