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Stephen Maing & NYPD 12

Courage Under Fire Award

Stephen Maing is an Emmy-nominated, Brooklyn-based filmmaker. His 2012 feature documentary, High Tech, Low Life, chronicled the gripping story of two of China's first dissident citizen-journalists fighting state-monitored censorship, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.  His short film The Surrender, produced with Academy Award winner Laura Poitras, documented State Department intelligence analyst Stephen Kim's harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary. He has directed numerous films for Time Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, The Intercept, PBS and Field of Vision; his New York Times Op-Docs documentary, Hers to Lose, was awarded a World Press Photo Award for Long Features. Maing is a Sundance Institute Fellow, a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Reporting Fellow, and an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee. His most recent film, Crime + Punishment, was filmed over four years and received a Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

 

NYPD 12 is a group of minority whistleblower officers who risk everything to expose racially discriminatory policing practices in the NYPD and smash the blue wall of silence.  Using secret recordings between officers and commanders, firsthand accounts, and emotional testimony, the NYPD 12 detail the explosive truth when no one else will listen. In the meantime, Manuel Gomez, an ex-cop turned private investigator, collects testimony from young minorities who have been affected by these policies and targeted by officers in the name of fighting crime.