Editor's Note: Last Train Home airs September 27, 2011, on PBS' POV. This article appeared in the September 2010 online Documentary in conjunction wsith the film's theatrical release thrugh Zeitgeist Films.

Last Train Home masterfully chronicles the personal story of the Zhangs, a family of migrant factory workers in China, to reveal the human story behind the billions of products stamped "Made in China."  The parents, Changhua and Chen Suqin, left their poor rural village to toil in the factories of Guangzhou for 17 years, leaving behind their infant children to be cared for by grandparents. Sadly, they can only afford to return home to see their children once a year, during the New Year holiday. One painful result is that their rebellious teenage daughter is very resentful and angry that her parents have been absent most of her life.

The Zhangs gave director Lixan Fan remarkable access, enabling him to capture incredibly intimate moments between the husband and wife as well as an explosive family argument. Though the documentary focuses on one family, the filmmaker never lets you forget that the Zhang parents are just two of the many millions of migrant workers in China. The opening scene and later sequences in the film, for example, show the incredible cacophony and ensuing chaos at the train station during the New Year holiday. A sweeping panoramic shot captures thousands and thousands of people waiting with intense anticipation to take the train home. The enormity of this mass undertaking is underscored by the text on the screen informing viewers that more than 130 million migrant workers journey home only once a year, during the New Year. Other scenes in the factories or on the train reveal the hardships and challenges these workers face: unaffordable health care, no pension and no safety net. Last Train Home is a rare achievement. It tells a compelling personal story within a social and political context, a cogent reminder that the personal is political.

Lixan Fan was born and raised in China and moved to Montreal in 2006. Luckily for him, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang was looking for a sound recorder who could speak a specific Chinese dialect for his film Up the Yangtze. Lixan, who had worked as a journalist for CCTV, a Chinese television network, began working on the film as a soundman and soon began doing other work on the film, eventually earning the title of associate producer.

Lixan discussed his feature-length debut Last Train Home in a recent phone interview. Last Train Home is currently screening in New York at the IFC Center and opens September 17 in Los Angeles and September 24 in the San Francisco Bay Area, through Zeitgeist Films.

IDA: When did you start thinking about making Last Train Home?

Lixan Fan: About four years ago when we were shooting Up the Yangtze. During a break in filming, I went on a research trip to Guangzhou, where there are thousands of factories. I went to search for potential subjects for my film. I met many families and interviewed about 40 people. I was lucky that I met the Zhangs. The mother told me their story and I found it immediately impressive. She and her husband had been working in factories for 16 years and only go home during the [Chinese] New Year. They've probably spent [a total of] less than a year with their daughter. They have a grandmother back home and they do this trip every year. I thought their story really stood out and could help me explore many different aspects, like how family structure is being impacted by migrant work. So I asked them if they would be interested in being filmed.

IDA: How did you ask them?
 

LF: I told them I was making a film about migrant workers. At the beginning they were somewhat cautious about being in the film. Of course they understood that it is a big commitment and it may have a big impact on their family. In the migrant world, you don't really trust strangers, and you can't really make friends because work moves so often. Someone sitting next to you one day may be gone the next day.

I opened myself up and told them my own story about why I am making this film. I told them, "It's about something much bigger; I want to work with you to tell the story of the hundreds of millions of migrant workers."

They felt it was their responsibility to give a voice to their peer workers. So they agreed to be filmed, and as time went by we had a really strong relationship. I didn't know we would be filming for three years, but I kept going back year after year. Essentially we became one big family.

IDA: When did you begin shooting?

LF: We did some shooting that first trip. We used some of that footage. The [principle] shooting started June/July in 2006. Every year I would go back to the city and countryside. Over three years, I spent five months each year shooting.

In the factory, life was robotic: eat, work, go back to sleep. I spent more time in the factory. I always think that this topic deserves this amount of time to be invested. I asked my crew to always go there every day to hang out with the workers and the subjects. Sometimes we would wait until midnight to follow them back home. By investing this amount of time, we managed to get some really nice footage.

After [the Zhangs] spent so much time with us, they were very comfortable with us. When the father went to see the daughter to persuade her to come back home during New Year's, I asked permission to film from another room. They talked about their own lives and at the end we got a couple lines that are very emotional.

IDA: You captured so many personal, intimate moments. Was there a particular time during production when you felt you were able to go more deeply into the family relationships?

LF: The tipping point was when the daughter and the father had a big fight. That was a tough moment for me. I felt I should be objective. On the other hand, you spend so much time together, it's like seeing my family fight; I care about them. It was a really big dilemma for me. I struggled for ten seconds or so, and I actually went in the frame. To me it's a very human reaction. I surrendered myself to my basic emotion, rather than my rational emotion. Was it right or wrong? I went in and separated them. Later on I sat with the father, and spoke with him for a long time. I asked him if it was OK to use the scene in the film.

I was never sure if it was the right thing or the wrong thing to walk into the scene. It really changed the dynamic of the film. In the editing, I was quite nervous about putting it into the film; I thought it might be too harsh. I thought that even though the parents agreed, maybe it was too violent. My editor Mary Stephens told me that as a director, I shot the scene and the footage speaks for itself. The audience deserves to see the truth. Once I shoot it, it's not my property. I don't have the right to hide it. It's such an emotional thing.

IDA: Did you ask for permission for each time you filmed?

LF: For special things, we would ask for permission [from the family] out of respect. For example, it was a village tradition for the first day of the New Year to go and pray at the temple. It was a very private moment. So I asked the mother if we could film, and she let me follow her. For things like that, I ask for permission. But other than that, the family was totally fine with us filming.

I didn't have a problem filming in China. To film in the factory, we asked for permission from the factory owners. It took a lot of time. At the train station, we were actually fine. It wasn't as difficult as I would have expected, but we had an all-Chinese crew. Also, I used to work for CCTV. I had some friends helping me, and they talked to people. We had been filming there for three years. The first year was more difficult but we come back the second year and they were less cautious. Also, that year was the big snowstorm; thousands of people were stuck at the station and there was a big media war [to cover the story]. There was one moment in the railway station when the situation got really tense. A girl was carried over the tops of people's heads. At the time, a high-ranking official saw us shooting and stopped us from filming. We stopped and we went back to our home base. Then we copied the footage we had on a hard drive and sent copies to Beijing and Canada. But we went back the next day to film and it was fine.

IDA: Did you show the film to the family?

LF: I gave a DVD to the family and they saw it. The father told me that it was very sad for him to see the family story on the screen. I could see how sad he was about his daughter. The mother said she still couldn't see why their daughter was so angry. The daughter didn't want to see it. She's 20 years old and recently lost her job working in a hotel. I met her two months ago; she's looking for a new job and she has a boyfriend. She seems to be happy.

IDA: What has the audience response been like?

LF: Quite positive; people really liked the film. The film has been shown in a few Chinese film festivals, in Shanghai and at the Guanzhou documentary film festival, which was really surprising to me. We went through the censorship board.

In Guanzhou, the audience was really young people. I had students tell me that after watching the film, it was like watching their own lives. I also had migrant workers coming to me, and a theater worker said she saw half the film and couldn't stop crying. We're working on getting the film in Chinese cinemas, working through the film bureau, but I don't know if it will happen.

I was very surprised that the film could screen in the Shanghai Film Festival, the largest film festival in China. Before the Olympics everyone was saying China was changing, but after the Olympics it actually got worse.

IDA: You mean worse in terms of state control?

LF: Yes, state control. There's definitely more state control.

IDA: What has been the audience response around the world?

LF: In North America, they are quite conscious in finding the message and how they can help alleviate the life conditions of the migrant. They also ask questions about why millions have to undertake such a life. I'm especially happy to see that many people think about themselves and the cheap products that are made by the migrants. By making the film, I was trying to show the other side of what's behind the cheap product.

IDA: So you were trying to show the human story of what's behind the "Made in China" label.

LF: Yes, people have to endure such constant separation from their families. It's such an immense human cost for a product that we consume.

IDA: What do you hope people come away with after they see the film?

LF: I hope they understand that their lives in the developed world are somehow connected to migrants as well. Globalization has brought it all together. I hope people will be more cautious about capitalism and globalization and think about how we can all come up with a better plan. I don't mean to make this film to accuse the government. Everyone has this problem. The factories in developing countries are being exploited by corporations. What can everyone do to change it? I think that's a question I want the audience to have. I had always wanted to get this message across. I was very consciously trying to get this moment that would help me say this message.

IDA: What are you working on next?

LF: China's clean energy project. The government is building the world's largest wind farm in the Gobi Desert, and has said it will spend ten years building it. So I will be following this story. They started two years ago. I was in the Gobi Desert last year and I plan to go back later this year.

Chuleenan Svetvilas is a writer and editor in Berkeley, California. 

Promoting the awareness of dangerous facts without editorializing becomes an aggressive political act in Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, co-directed by frequent collaborators Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano. Excavating the onerous past of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the film is less about racial tension than about the friction between heritage and justice, as well as the punitive limits of a democratic state where personal beliefs are protected, no matter how nocuous. In 1964, the small southern county became the subject of international controversy when three young adult civil rights workers investigating the razing of a church--Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, a black man from the nearby city of Meridan-were tortured, murdered and buried in an earthen dam just outside city limits.

Both Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish activists from New York who had connected with Chaney through the Freedom Summer voting campaign; the fact that their whiteness failed to exempt them from prejudiced terrorism helped the civil rights movement transcend delicate issues of tradition preservation to become an inarguably humanitarian struggle. But while a collection of local municipal and ecclesiastical authorities affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan were tried for the crimes on charges of rights deprivation by the federal government, they avoided conviction and imprisonment due to the state's unwillingness to assist, or take its own action against the conspirators.

In Neshoba County itself this history of violent insensitivity and xenophobia is almost never discussed. But Dickoff and Pagano provocatively suggest that an undercurrent of potentially explosive paranoia is always felt there, even today. As the film's primary narrative thread begins in 2005 with the efforts of the Philadelphia Coalition--a multiracial action group formed specifically to seek justice for Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney's killings--the directors criss-cross between these newfound glimmers of hopeful tolerance and antiquarian footage from Neshoba's Jim Crow-enforcing and red scare-embracing past. These archival flashbacks required nearly two years of fundraising to obtain with usage rights, but they provide a vital, contextual fulcrum upon which we might comprehend the startling expository content to follow. The grisly details of the 1964 murders that unfold through autopsy notes and testimony from the victims' families are independently unfathomable, but the tragic tension intensifies even further as we observe the inability of many Philadelphia citizens to confront their endemic horrors with candor.

In one extended sequence, Dickoff and Pagano interview locals at a county fair; they dumbfoundingly evade the Coalition's efforts in conversation and softly defend the darker side of their culture's ideology. Moreover, the influence of segregation as a collective psychology is still evident in the respect they maintain for their elders, even those who were (and are) active Klan members. "I couldn't debate them about it," says Dickoff, "but I found the reluctance of many Neshoba Countians very frustrating, whatever their fears. These were just ordinary people, good people for the most part, yet they were willing to let murderers go unpunished. That was chilling. It was hard to reconcile that people today in the 21st Century have not outgrown their ignorance." But, Dickoff saliently adds, "We can't ask whites to give up their traditions unless they violate the law."

And what of those who do break the law? The second and third acts of Neshoba are dominated by exclusive interviews with Edgar Ray Killen, a former preacher and Klansman who was instrumental in organizing the execution of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. Dickoff and Pagano were unaware at the start of production that the Philadelphia Coalition planned to target Killen with legal action, but after an indictment was issued in 2005 they remained in Neshoba to capture the trial and unprecedentedly intimate footage of the largely unrepentant defendant. The aging Killen was smeared by every media outlet to which he offered statements--in the words of Pagano, "They crucified him" --and thus was eager to tell his story to more objective ears.

"It's a very simplistic approach to demonize Killen," Pagano points out. "We tried very hard not to do that, and let him do it himself. We wanted to show that people in this community really like him." Indeed, Dickoff and Pagano give him the liberty to ramble on about his innocence and misunderstood credo within the sun-saturated environs of his small farm, positing a stark formal contrast with the black-backgrounded, talking-head vehemence of the victims' survivors. "Killen is a product of his environment," Pagano adds. "[It was essential] to see his environment wider to get a sense of where he lives. You'll notice the amount of close-ups of Killen are few." Perversely, Killen is free to spout his ignorant ruminations while the families of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney are eternally ensnared by the trauma they've endured.

Pressed on whether or not she feels that the film could foster sympathy for Killen's short-sightedness, Dickoff replies, "Some people feel we push the limits of freedom of speech by giving Killen a forum to spout his beliefs and spew his hate," she replied. "[But] I think we should all try to understand where Killen came from...sympathy for him doesn't equal approval." Pagano almost feels as though Killen's political incorrectness deserved more rhetorical control. "I wish we'd put in some more racy stuff," he says. "Killen really [went] after the homosexuals. He [went] after everyone...There are several times in there that he goes off on the coalition, about them being ‘faggots'...that we didn't put in. He's one of the most cunning, smartest, non-educated men I've ever met in my life."

As Neshoba makes clear by its resolution, the insidious intelligence of men like Killen, who have maintained their views and community stature by feeding local anxieties, has allowed the region's racism to persistently manifest itself in subtle ways. The reference to "the price of freedom" in the film's title is thus both a celebration of the efforts of civil rights activists and a reminder that democracy will always allow a safe harbor for hate until it veers into criminal territory, as Killen's did. "Edgar Ray Killen was convicted for what he did, not for what he believed," says Dickoff. "And we have to keep that in the forefront."

But where does a place like Philadelphia go from here? The indictment (and surprising conviction) of Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter has proved a somewhat unsatisfactory victory that still required nimble political deftness; one can't help but feel that after over 40 years, the wound is still raw and throbbing. "Killen is a scapegoat," intones Pagano. "Let's face it. Killen was prosecuted...because he's the poorest [of the living conspirators]. And he's got the biggest mouth. And the state is never gonna go after anyone else. They're just waiting for those people to die. There are only four alleged [conspirators] left." But Pagano also admits that racism has metamorphosed, even in Neshoba County. "In that community specifically, it's economic. If you're black and I'm white, and we both go into a bank to get a home loan, I'm getting that house and you're not. The railroad tracks still literally divide the town."

Dickoff, too, views the fight against discrimination in Neshoba as an uphill battle, but remarkable responses to screenings of the film throughout the American South have made the task seem less Sisyphean. "The film has a way of making people open up," she says, "especially if they're angry or upset, because it makes them think about race in a way that they never thought about before. Leroy Clemons, the co-chair of the Philadelphia Coalition, brought his family to see the film. And they came to this discussion afterward and his daughter, who had just graduated from college, said, ‘This is the first time that I feel good about my community. I was not going to come back to Philadelphia, Mississippi, but now that I see this hope I'm gonna come back and try to work on it.' "

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom opens September 10 in Los Angeles through First Run Features.

Joseph Jon Lanthier is a cultural critic and vegan currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stunned and frightened, Alessandro Ibiapina accompanied his mother into a bleak São Paulo, Brazil police station on the evening of January 27, 2008. Only four hours before, Jose Ibiapina--Alessandro's father--had been abducted by a small group of thugs while at work.

There inside the station, headquarters to DAS (Divisão Anti-Sequestro), or Anti-Kidnapping Division, sat Dario Dezem patiently waiting. Wearing a DAS t-shirt, he may have appeared to be a policeman, but in fact he was the primary cameraman working on Jorge Atalla's documentary Sequestro (Kidnapping). Living across the street from the station at a hotel for weeks, Dezem had been pining for a moment exactly like this. Even though he and Atalla had been shooting for more than three years and had countless hours of incredible footage, they felt the film lacked an important piece to Atalla's intricate vision.

Before the grief-stricken Ibiapinas entered the room where they would be interviewed, Dezem quickly taped a microphone underneath the table and casually set his DV Cam down, aimed and recorded the unaware Ibiapinas.

Completing Sequestro, Atalla's ambitious doc about kidnapping in São Paulo, would require other risks of far greater magnitude than the amateur subterfuge performed during the Ibiapinas' first visit to DAS. It would take four grueling years before Atalla satisfactorily documented the large criminal tapestry made up of kidnappers, the abducted, victims' families and police.

Long before Sequestro, Atalla, who studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, screened his first documentary,  A Vida em Cana, in 2001 at a film festival in Miami. That same year, the kidnapping boom in São Paulo--over 300 reported cases--was grabbing headlines around the world. Considering his possibilities, Atalla thought he'd found his subject.

To film Cana, Atalla had lived with sugar cane workers for six months. So when he told a friend about examining kidnappings in his next film, Atalla's friend asked him, "If for your first film you lived for six months with cane cutters, how are you going to do the same for a movie about kidnapping?"

 "I really had no idea what we were doing in the beginning," admits Atalla, who, battling continued resistance from his family for nearly three years of pre-production, had to keep his plans secret. Compounding matters, when his father's health turned poor, Atalla became saddled with more responsibility overseeing the family business. Finally, he was a rookie filmmaker looking for financing.

Atalla, patient and resolved, eventually scaled these early obstacles within three years, only to have a bloated production team waste the first $200,000 in three months filming training exercises rather than real action. Shortly after the money was gone, Atalla lost his permit to shoot--something that would happen several more times.

In 2004 Atalla caught a break. He was introduced to Artur Dian, a hotshot inspector in DAS who, at the time of their introduction, was working around the clock with his team on ten kidnapping cases. Meeting Dian was pivotal, but utilizing that contact to move the production process forward took a while. "I spent a whole year with Artur learning everything I could about kidnapping before we were able to get the permits we needed to film with DAS," says Atalla.

With permits finally in hand, Atalla and Dezem, now the sole cameraman, were told to stay out of the way when filming and to not expect DAS to spend much energy protecting them in the field. DAS advised the filmmakers, "If you hear shooting, duck."

Years of negotiating the clearance to film DAS was one thing, but winning them over proved to be another. "They are very closed and worried about what information they leak out because they are always dealing with a human life, so they didn't talk much [in the beginning]," says Atalla. "They didn't make friends with me at all."

For inspector Rafael Correa Lodi, it was not until he was truly convinced of Atalla's motives that he began loosening the tight reign he commanded. "I liked that [Atalla] envisioned a project that followed the day-to-day of DAS and would tell the whole story," says Lodi. He recalls being forced to accommodate news crews that would swoop in for only a brief spell, usually during highly publicized cases, mining more for controversy than truth.

With greater access came increased peril. And the dummy police uniforms and flimsy bulletproof jackets Atalla and Dezem donned were little protection against the emotional tragedy and violence they encountered. They were in the thick of it, just what they'd been after, but the question was, Would they survive?

 "Sometimes when we were filming it was like being in a non-ending terror action movie," says Atalla, who was often away from home for two or three days at a time. And when he'd finally get home, he would be so full of adrenaline or anxiety from events he had witnessed, such as seeing a father handcuffed and hauled away from his wife and two sons, that he turned to sleeping pills.

Raids were by far the most intense aspect of the production process. The crew would have virtually no time to get ready because the DAS themselves would hardly spend any time prepping. "Unlike [in] the States, where floor plans can be acquired, [in the favela] it is impossible," Rafael explains. "We can't even cut the power and telephone lines." When the DAS team identifies a potential safe house, they take less than a minute to equip before entering. No news travels faster in the favelas than the presence of police. The DAS' goal is to get in the house and free the victim before the kidnappers have any idea what hit them. Where Sequestro excels are in those moments when the victims, who have been staring at death for days on end, tortured physically and emotionally, are instantly set free; they are overcome with joy.

After three long years interviewing victims and filming with DAS, both filmmakers were mentally fatigued. Dezem withdrew from friends and family. "I saw things I never imagined could even happen," he recalls. "It was hard to separate myself from the cruelty I had witnessed."Atalla longed for a vacation from the daunting task he had undergone. He wanted to spend time with his growing family. But even though his wife desperately hoped for the same, she knew, as did Atalla, that the film still lacked a key element.

Most of what he had were fragmented narratives, stops and starts with no beginning, middle and end. "We had always wanted to follow a family from the first day until the end," says Atalla. Without a primary narrative that could see the movie through from start to finish, his film would fall flat.

Dezem began sleeping in a hotel across the street from the DAS station, hoping to be at the station at just the right time. Finally, after weeks of nothing, on a hot evening in January, Dezem was present when the Ibiapinas came to the station looking for help.

Initially against the idea completely, the Ibiapinas slowly came around and granted Dezem access to their home.

It was just what the film needed, but Dezem was ill-prepared for this new level of access. "They began treating me like a member of the family," he explains. "I felt that the pain that the family was suffering, I was suffering too."

During all this, in some unknown apartment, lying on the floor behind a sofa, with a hood over his head, was Jose Ibiapina. And that is where and how he stayed for 33 hellish days before a deal was eventually struck. His son Alessandro delivered all the money he had been able to raise to a designated drop-off point before going home to wait. After 24 hours with no word, a taxi driver finally called, saying that he had Jose crumpled up in his back seat unable to speak, but he was bringing him home.

Alessandro quickly called Lodi, whom Dezem happened to be dropping off for the day. Lodi then informed Dezem he had about five minutes to get over to the Ibiapinas. Dezem left Lodi immediately, speeding recklessly across town. He managed to pull up to the Ibiapinas' home in the nick of time, hopping out of his car and aiming his camera just as Alessandro pulled his father from the taxi, embracing him joyously before rushing him inside.

Dezem was relieved to have gotten the pivotal footage necessary to wrap Sequestro properly, but more important, he was delighted to see Jose alive and reunited with his family.

As an observational film, Sequestro is a moving picture both emotionally and cinematically that avoids making assessments or critiques of its subject matter. This is a film about what victims of kidnappings endure and how they and their families cope during and after the ordeal. Atalla's perseverance and honesty proved to be his greatest assets in making his film, enabling him to gain the trust and access necessary to capture such immediate and raw footage.

Sequestro opens September 10 in New York and Los Angeles through Yukon Filmworks, Midmix Entertainment, Filmland International and Paradigm Pictures.

R. T. Watson is a reporter and writer based in Los Angeles.

THIS EVENT IS OVER AND WAS A COMPLETE SUCCESS. THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO ATTENDED.

IDA is proud to present this very special Doc U, scheduled for Monday, October 18th at The Cinefamily (at The Silent Movie Theater). Doors open at 7 p.m. 

October's exceptional Doc U session features a live appearance by Lucy Walker, a rising star of documentary filmmaking whose recent films Waste Land and Countdown To Zero have been dominating 2010's major festivals! The evening's on-stage conversation and film clips will be followed by an audience Q&A, and a wine reception sponsored by The Pithy Little Wine Company on the Cinefamily's backyard patio.

Discount admission available for IDA members. IDA's September Doc U featuring Harry Shearer sold out, and seating is again limited for the Lucy Walker event, so BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW to be guaranteed admission.

For further event details and to buy tickets, view the event page.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides funding for the making of a 3-minute PSA about Docs Rock.

Video was created by UCLA film students, Diana Densmore and Susana Casares.

Find out more about IDA's Docs Rock program.

DONATE to IDA - it's 100% tax deductible.

IDA's Docs Rock program received $9,000 in support from the City of Los Angeles' Department of Cultural Affairs for the 2010-2011 school year.

In its 12th year, Docs Rock introduces high school students to the world of documentary filmmaking.  Docs Rock prepares youth for college and employment by teaching them essential life skills as well as the technical know-how to create a documentary.  The intensive curriculum offers: in-class and outside the classroom activities, hands-on filmmaking experience and opportunities to meet numerous industry professionals. At the end of each school year, the 40-week program culminates with Docs Rock Festival, where student films are showcased to local residents, family members, community leaders, and professional filmmakers.

To learn more about Docs Rock and view student films, go to the dedicated Docs Rock page.

To make a donation to Docs Rock or if your high school is interested in implementing the Docs Rock program, please contact our development associate, Cindy at cindy@documentary.org.

Supervisor, First District, Gloria Molina recently confirmed a grant award to IDA in the amount of $53,500 from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.  The funds will be used to support IDA's acclaimed Doc U Program, a series of hands-on educational seminars for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers, taught by artists and experts on subjects ranging from marketing and distribution to working with composers, writers or agents.

IDA also received a grant earlier this year from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the amount of $7,500 to expand Doc U to cities outside of the Los Angeles area.

These funding awards allow IDA to better support documentary filmmakers, and we are grateful for the generosity of both the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation for their ongoing support of IDA.

For more information on Doc U, visit the Doc U page.

David Wolper, whose Wolper Organization was a pioneering force in documentary production during the first two decades of American television, passed away last night at his home in Beverly Hills. He had been suffering from congestive heart failure and Parkinson's Disease.

With almost all of the news and documentary work being produced in New York in the 1950s, Wolper set up shop in Los Angeles and lured filmmakers like Mel Stuart and Jack Haley Jr. to work with him. Over the next decades, the Wolper team produced such works as The Race for Space, D-Day, The Making of the President series, the Jacques Cousteau television specials and hundreds more. He and his team would go on to earn nine Oscar nominations and one Oscar (for Hellstrom Chronicle), two Peabodys and 100 other awards.

"David brought the documentary to Hollywood," says Stuart. "The West Coast became an important source of documentaries from about 1959 on, and David was able to persuade the major networks to air them. His main strength was that he was able to find ideas and come up with ideas that would appeal to the networks. What we created was a place where David didn't direct the programs himself, but there was an atmosphere where all the creative personnel had a freedom that you don't have today. We made our films, David sold them and we didn't have any interference from either the sponsors or the networks."

Wolper was also instrumental in helping to launch the International Documentary Association. He attended the first meeting in 1982, and he provided valuable counsel and financial support in the beginning years. He earned the Career Achievement Award in 1988, and thanks to the efforts of then-IDA board member Gabor Kalman, the Student Documentary Achievement Award bears his name to this day.

"One of David's great talents was that he had an absolute instinct for what would be successful," says IDA founder Linda Buzzell, who was director of research at the Wolper Organization. "He had the same instinct for people. He really could recognize talent."

 "David had the ability, with the networks and sponsors who were buying these films, to give them the dream," Stuart adds. "He was a dreamer, but he made the dreams come true."

Amir Bar-Lev, director of The Tillman Story, was no great insider to his subject, post-NFL athlete and US Corporal Patrick Tillman, when he began making his film. "I knew there were myths around his death," Bar-Lev says, "but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life."

Bar-Lev's last film, My Kid Could Paint That, is about a could-be toddler art-prodigy with a curiously unsuccessful painter-father. As My Kid also traffics in themes of family and misrepresentation, the director "sheepishly handed over a copy of the film [to the Tillman family] as an example of my work. I had to tell them, ‘Unless Pat's dad was secretly playing football for him...'"

Pat Tillman was a popular professional football player before deciding to enlist. A tall and imposing 25-year-old, Tillman was on his second tour when he was pronounced dead. As the news had brought such attention to this man who left a multi-million-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to fight for his country, his death was a project for careful PR. Military publicity transformed this already principled and courageous figure into a hero--and they did this by rewriting the details of his death. Armed with a massive box of records, Dannie Tillman, Pat's mother, uncovered a considerable revision of history. Pat, the victim of friendly fire, was killed during an awkwardly plotted expedition by his own troops, many of whom reported they were just eager to be in a firefight. Pat Tillman was a public figure because of his career, and his decision to enlist put him in the public eye for new reasons, so it's easy to see why his loss, a national tragedy by its very nature, could not be reported as an accident besot with incompetence.

The Tillman Story features an incredible amount of report footage, the most impressive of which was footage that may or may not have been taken from the expedition during which Tillman was killed. This footage, which was captured from a vehicle, is disarmingly unspecific; neither people nor distinguishing traits of landscape appear, so what we see, which might otherwise present us with all the answers we need, is actually no evidence at all--there is no answer in the image.

 "Pat's last words were ‘I'm Pat Fucking Tillman,'" notes Bar-Lev. "On one level he was saying, ‘I'm your platoon-mate,' trying to indicate to the soldiers shooting at him from 40 meters away for 15 minutes. In retrospect, there's a deep irony. Only minutes after he died, people would begin turning him into something he wasn't, so his last words sound like a call from the dead, from a guy saying, ‘I'm just who I am, don't make me something I'm not'--which is exactly what happened."

It's easy to find the situation confusing; after all, this homegrown success story leaves a lucrative NFL contract to fight in Afghanistan. Just based on that choice, he sounds like a hero in the old guard. However, as Bar-Lev points out, "He wasn't, as they described him, ‘above all, principled'; he wasn't a paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view." And, in a way, that desire to see from many vantage points is what Bar-Lev is trying to return to his subject--a man who took risks and won games like the best leaders of legend, but was flattened into a fake icon and exploited by national media. The curious part of this dehumanizing is distinguishing the culprits from the messengers. Was it a failure of intelligence or a failure of reporting? Regardless, those in charge of the information weren't going to help.

Tillman's mother was tireless. A short period after his death, the Army relinquished its intelligence on the incident to her. Presented with thousands of pages about a son's death, most parents would throw up their hands, but she dug through the material and found the roots of what amounted to a government cover-up. Forcing an opportunity to get answers from Congress, the family took part in a hearing. Confronting the generals in charge would seem like a promising conclusion to a battle with injustice and false impression, but it wasn't. "When audiences see the scene in the congressional room, they're vocally angry, yelling at the screen, because it's so patently obvious [what's happening]," Bar-Lev notes. "But that's not at all how it was reported; those generals gave this kind of Keystone Kops, self-flagellating, disingenuous apology--‘Gee, we're sorry we screwed this thing up'-- and it was reported as ‘Military Apologizes to The Tillmans.' We all engage in sound bites, but the treatment of Tillman to this point flattens him, shaving off sides of his personality to conform to a Hollywood cookie-cutter [ideal]."

An illuminating outtake in the film shows a congressman trying to calm Dannie Tillman at the hearing. "She asked a basic question, and one of these patronizing lieutenants said, ‘Ma'am, this was like the first scene in Saving Private Ryan.' What a great post-modern moment! Everyone knows Hollywood learns about warfare from the military--but the military learns about soldiering from Hollywood. It goes back through this hall of mirrors to the beginning of time; it's a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to believe these 19-year-old kids from Pat's platoon, the ones who shot on his position with these powerful and somewhat fun weapons, were learning how to shoot them partially from training and partially from films."

In the process of reviewing Tillman, Bar-Lev describes a different model of heroism; he considers this a necessity, given the actions of his subject and those of the Tillman family. "I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex," he maintains. "‘Hero' is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they're speaking about."

On the pitfalls of representing a subject that's so extensively about misrepresentation, Bar-Lev observes, "There may not be such thing as ‘Truth.' but there is definitely such thing as a bullshit-lie, and that's between you and your footage. Your cutting is your opinion."

The Tillman Story begins at a football field during a ceremony to honor Tillman and his family. The first we see of him is in direct address as he's shooting the footage on which his performance statistics will be overlaid for TV broadcast. This footage, without the benefit of stats to give the eerie piece context, just shows Tillman looking forward, silent, waiting for the cameraman to let him leave. He looks at the camera in pregnant silence, and we don't know why. "He just staring at you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and anytime you're looking at an uncomfortably long silence of a person in front of you, you impose your own narrative," Bar-Lev notes. "And that's what we've been doing to Pat Tillman from the moment he enlisted. He's never had a chance to speak for himself; he's been subject to one narrative or another. At the end of the film, you see that kind of uncomfortably alive footage fossilized into a statue. Our film is bookended by the living Pat and its antipode that's not moving."

The statue of Tillman, which stands in front of the University of Phoenix Stadium at the newly titled Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza, captures a famous image of Tillman in motion--it's a bronze re-creation of the Sports Illustrated cover shot of Tillman the day he helped the Cardinals win a game against the Dallas Cowboys. "We called that the Han Solo moment," Bar-Lev explains. "You remember, when he was dipped in the vat of--Wow, dipped into that vat of something we don't have on this planet!"

The Tillman Story premieres in theaters August 20 through The Weinstein Company.

Sara Vizcarrando is a film journalist writing and living in San Francisco, Calif.

Editor's Note: Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished airs Tuesday, May 3, on PBS' Independent Lens. The following article was published last August in conjunction with the film's theatrical premiere.

A Film Unfinished takes audiences on a journey back some 68 years in time to life in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. The film was conceived, written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, who has artfully blended archival footage taken by German cameramen as content for a Nazi propaganda film with images of a handful of survivors sharing painful memories of the Holocaust.

The 89-minute documentary was produced by Belfilms LTD with the support of the New Israel Foundation for Cinema and Television, Yad Vashem Project and YES Docu. It earned the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Best International Documentary Feature Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival earlier this year. The documentary was subsequently picked up for theatrical distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Hersonski began her career as a freelance director and editor after graduating from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2003. She subsequently edited a weekly documentary program that aired on Channel 10 in Israel. A Film Unfinished was her first turn at the helm during production of a feature-length documentary.

The Warsaw ghetto came into being after the German army invaded and occupied Poland in April 1940. More than 400,000 Jewish people who lived in Warsaw were forced to live in a walled ghetto that occupied less than three square miles. Countless numbers of them  and more than 200,000 refugees who were brought to the ghetto, died of  starvation, typhus and other diseases. Most survivors were sent to almost certain death at Treblinka and other concentration camps.

An hour's worth of film footage was discovered in an East German archive at the end of World War II, with the title Das Ghetto written on the cans. The black-and-white film was produced by German cameramen who were brought to the ghetto in May 1942.  During the 1960s, a German historian, who was doing research about the ghetto in a Polish archive, found an entry permit given to a German cameraman named Willy Wist. In 1998, Adrian Wood, a British researcher, was looking for footage from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in a vault on a US Air Force base in Germany, and he noticed two film cans on the floor titled Das Ghetto. Wood had years of experience with Holocaust footage, and what he had found was multiple outtakes of  scenes where German cameraman and S.S. guards accidentally got into backgrounds while other people were shooting. That film provided tangible evidence that scenes of Jews living the high life were staged propaganda.

"A Film Unfinished emerged out of my preoccupation with the notion of the perpetrators of war crimes creating an archive that testifies to the suffering of their victims," Hersonski says. "The systematic documentation of these horrors has changed forever how the past is archived. These images have been used in many films. In the worst cases, they have been presented as straight-forward historical truth."  

In 2006, Hersonski wrote a short essay outlining her ideas for a documentary and submitted it to Noemi Schory, an experienced film producer in Israel. That was less than a year after Schory had completed her work on the new Visual Center at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, which includes more than 100 short films that use archival footage. Schory told Hersonski about a diary written by a 15-year-old girl, which describes a German camera crew making a propaganda film in the ghetto.

About a month later, Hersonski traveled to Jerusalem to watch a copy of the 62-minute rough cut of the Nazi propaganda film that was never released. "After so many years of being bombarded with films about the Holocaust, I was shocked that I didn't know anything about this film," she says. "Until you see it, you can't understand the evil behind its making, and the distorted ways it was used in dozens of documentaries after the war. I asked myself, How can a propaganda film shot from the point of view of the perpetrators of  a crime truly reflect the realities facing the victims?"

Hersonski traveled to Berlin to meet the archivists and learn more about the history of the footage. She discovered that approximately 90 percent of the film created by the Nazis was destroyed during the last days of the war. No documents were found revealing who initiated the propaganda film and why it wasn't completed.

Schory and Itay Ken-Tor, a producer/director, who has been worked at Belfilms since 2000 and managed the organization for the past three years, came on board as producers. Hersonski credits a "persistent" Israeli researcher for finding nine survivors of the crimes committed in the Warsaw ghetto. They were teenagers or younger during the war, and they now lived in Israel, England, Poland and the United States. She contacted them and asked if they would be willing to be filmed sharing memories and their thoughts while watching film found in the archives. "I explained in detail what they were going to see, and asked if they were absolutely certain they could stand the shock," Hersonski says. "I was relieved that five of them were more than willing to come. After every session, I was physically numb and mentally worn out. The four women who were filmed watching and commenting on the archival footage live in Israel. The only man [among the five participating survivors] died last year."

Willy Wist, one of the German cameramen who were brought to Warsaw to shoot Das Ghetto, also agreed to share his memories. He had been called to testify when the West German government prosecuted war criminals during the 1960s. "We had no idea of what was happening until we arrived," he recalls in the film. "The thought that these people would be systematically murdered never entered my mind. The SS brought us Jews whom they wanted us to film. We could see the fear on their faces." After 30 days, the film crews packed their gear and left. 

A Film Unfinished ranges from close-in shots of faces of starving adults and children to a staged scene in a restaurant where waiters are carrying trays stacked with food to show the world the paradise that rich Jews lived in. There are haunting close-ups of the faces of the survivors and Wist sitting in a darkened cinema, sharing their feelings as they watch images projected on the screen-such as people desperately searching for food in piles of trash at a garbage dump, while one of the survivors recalls doing that when she was ten years old. In another scene, Wist reminisces about filming a staged shot of an attractive woman looking in a mirror as she applies lipstick; shots like that one were designed to contrast with film of a shabbily dressed woman walking on the street, carrying her baby and begging for bread. Itai Neeman, an Israeli cinematographer, heightens the drama with intuitively sensitive composition and use of light and darkness playing on the faces and eyes.

The man whom the Nazis had appointed director of the Jewish Council was filmed sitting at his desk looking like a corporate executive. He obeyed the Nazis, but wrote entries in his diary expressing his feelings. Other people risked their lives by documenting history as it was happening, in their diaries-some of which, including the one maintained by the council director, were also found in archives. Hershonski had a narrator verbally punctuate images by reading appropriate words selected from the diaries. "A time will come when no survivors are left," she says. "The archival footage, unlike paper documents, bears a much more layered testimony regarding the realities it witnesses. It will remain as our source of understanding our history. The film will testify to the crimes that were committed and the suffering of the victims."

On August 5, despite appeals by Oscilloscope Laboratory president Adam Yauch, Hersonski and Hanna Abrusky, one of the survivors who appears in the film, the MPAA classification and ratings appeals board upheld an "R" rating for A Film Unfinished. The reason given was that the film contains "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity."

The "graphic nudity" is a brief shot of a few naked men and women separately stepping into a pool, which the narrator describes as a ritual Jewish bath. It is a graphic example of how the Nazis staged shots designed to denigrate Jewish people.

Yauch argued to the MPAA that it is important for young people to see A Film Unfinished to learn a valuable history lesson. As George Santayana wrote in 1905, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

“The MPAA "R" rating is extremely unfortunate,” says Oscilloscope Laboratories co-founder David Fenkel. "Yael has created a really powerful film that has important educational value for people of all ages…especially young people who aren’t familiar with the history. We are still uncovering layers of history of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. This documentary provides an extremely unique and fresh perspective of what the Nazis did in terms of media manipulation.

“It’s disheartening that the MPAA has decided to make it difficult for young people to experience this film,” Fenkel continues. “It's really crazy, because there are films with extreme violence and sex that get PG-13 ratings, but apparently it’s okay to censor history. Sure, some of the images in this film are not easy to watch, but a lot of truth isn't necessarily easy to watch. We should leave the choice up to the parent and teachers who believe that it is important to educate children. The realities of an “R” rating make it more difficult. But, I believe this film is good and important enough to get a wide audience. I believe this story about World War II is going to become a topic of conversation this year and for years to come.”

A Film Unfinished opens August 18 in New York City and August 20 in Los Angeles.

Bob Fisher has been writing about documentary and narrative filmmaking for nearly 40 years, mainly focusing on cinematography and preservation.