I’m in year three of shooting on a feature-length documentary film about Kesho Wazo, a Portland-based art and activist collective. For updates check out my notebook. Details and maybe a trailer will be coming soon!
Skill: Documentary
The Song of the Broad Axe
The poetic documentary film, The Song of the Broad Axe, uses an iconic object to explore the lives of people who choose to live a more purposeful life — one that involves using an axe on a daily basis. The film consists of a series of vignettes structured around the theme of building a life for yourself, through the lines of Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem, “Song of the Broad Axe.”
Each vignette explores how people use this tool to create purpose in their life, despite the availability of faster, more efficient ways of doing things. This film gives a glimpse into the worlds of competitive axe throwers, woodsmen team coaches, axe historians, axe makers, and home builders. Ultimately The Song of the Broad Axe is a film about finding your place in the world and the tools that you use to do it.
The Song of the Broad Axe is a short documentary film produced with Nina Schmir. It screened at the Maine International Film Festival, the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, and the Monadnock International Film Festival, and Maine-wide on MPBN.
“The axe is a symbolic stand-in for the movement towards civilization — the idea of taking something rough, raw materials, and turning it into something useful — through a combination of brawn, pluck and skill.” — Matt Bolinder, owner Speckled Ax
Maine Food
Maine Food is a joint project between Global Studies and Cinema Studies at Colby College. In these courses students produce documentary films about food production in Maine. Ever wonder how your favorite beer gets made? Or where the veggies you buy at the farmer’s market come from? Or how a cattle farmer makes his money (or not)? Subjects range from mussel aquaculture in Casco Bay, to a historic preservation farm in Waldoboro, to an intentional community in Benton. The films cover issues related to sustainability, community-building, and several touch on the difficulties of sustaining a profitable local farm. Not only will you meet the people who produce the food you buy at the farmer’s market and farm stands, but you will get a sense of the current state of local food production in Maine.
The films were produced by my Cinema Studies documentary courses and Maple Razsa’s senior seminar in Global Studies. This project was made possible by a Civic Engagement Course Development Grant from the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement. Special thanks to the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities and Academic ITS. Please visit the Maine Food website to see all the films.
Growing Trust
Maine has drastically cut back its food stamp support for recent immigrants and refugees who have resettled in the state. In Lewiston, a small group of Somali Bantus is struggling to find leasable farm land in order to extend the life of their food stamps. Growing Trust is a short documentary that explores the Bantu’s new relationship with retired pumpkin farmers who have agreed to rent out their land. The film details the struggle and the possibility of this newfound relationship between people who have lived and farmed in Maine their whole lives with recent immigrants with their own knowledge of farming from Somali. I directed and shot the film and it was produced with Maple Razsa and Catherine Besteman.
Documentary Production
I taught Documentary Production: An Editor’s Perspective in the Fall of 2016 and the Fall of 2014 at Colby College. I will teach it again in the Fall of 2017. In all these courses students created documentary videos for the Maine Food project. Please visit the course website to see the videos produced in the class.
In 2016 and 2017 we collaborated with Allen Island, which “is a 450 acre island located 5 miles south of Port Clyde, Maine. The island is owned and managed by the Up East Foundation. The island has commercial docks that support an active lobster fishery. The north end of the island has number of homes, a barn, and a bunk house for overnight guests. The south end of the island is undeveloped and accessed via a dirt road running through large tracks of native trees and fields grazed by 100 island sheep. The island was developed by Betsy Wyeth and was the inspiration for many of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings.” You can read about our class trip to island on the Allen Island website. While on the island students shot materials to edit a visual narrative.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A documentary comes to life in the editing room. In this course we will engage with various forms of documentary storytelling from an editor’s perspective. In addition to watching documentary films, students will produce and edit documentary videos. While attention will be paid to developing ideas and production, the class will focus most heavily on the editing phase of production. Time will be given to refine, recut and reedit the final documentary. Students will learn the art of the process, of revision and reimagining, as well as technical skills such as using a camera, shooting a scene, and interviewing techniques. Students will also develop their understanding and knowledge of the documentary genre in general.
How We Learned
A documentary web series, How We Learned explores how people are creatively inspired and how they learned the skills to construct and reshape the worlds they live in. Through short documentary portraits, this series raises questions about the traditional education system in the United States. This series started at the EdLab at Teachers College at Columbia University.
Something Different
Over the past half-century local, water-powered grain mills either converted to electric or shut down completely. In Union County, Pennsylvania there is one remaining hold out. Miller Curt Falk is doing something different – he is turning grain into flour and animal feed using water power. This beautifully shot short documentary offers a glimpse into the past through the day-to-day operations of the Grove’s Mill on Buffalo Creek. Something Different: A Working Gristmill offers a glimpse into a world that many people will never see in their lifetimes – a working gristmill running on water power.
Curt walks us through the process of using water to generate power and turning grain into flour and corn into corn meal. From cleaning to cracking to sifting each process is unique and done on machines that were built before the 1950s. Interwoven with the workings of the mill, Curt explains his family history and how he came to run the operations.
Something Different was created as a partnership between myself and two Bucknell Faculty members, historian David del Testa and mechanical engineer, Tom Rich. It screened at Maine International Film Festival, the Big Muddy Film Festival, and the Frozen River Film Festival.
NY2NO
While I was a video producer at the EdLab at Teachers College I produced a four-part web series about NYC youth activists. I followed them as they planned for a summer trip down to New Orleans to help rebuild three years after Katrina.
A Subversive Act
This is one of the first documentary shorts I ever made (it was actually a group project). I was still figuring out how to shoot and edit, but I wanted to include it here because I just love the story. We followed Pavla Jonssonova, a bassist for an all-women punk band in the Czech Republic. During communism they were forced to play underground, but were focused on playing happy songs about having tea. They still play together today. I have no permission to use the archival footage in this film.