The Mill Valley Film Festival opened last Thursday — you may have read reports of celebs such as James Franco and Sam Rockwell popping up in the Marin town. If you were actually there on Sunday you will have seen the work of three Berkeley Journalism School graduates included in the billing.
The three short documentaries were made as part of Berkeley’s Master’s in Journalism program. Each film is 26-minutes long and each one tells an equally compelling, if radically different tale.
Bagassi Koura’s The Stinking Ship tells the story of corporate dumping in Africa. The filmmaker sneaked a video camera into a toxic waste site to secure his footage. To make Guests of Space, Alba Mora Roca flew with Colombia’s national police into a war zone to shoot the Nukak Maku tribe of indigenous Amazonians. And, in Old People Driving, Shaleece Haas set out to capture on film the delicate time when elderly people make the decision to give up driving.
For those of us who missed the screenings over the weekend, skip over to UC Berkeley News more information on the filmmakers and their films. We’ll be the first to let you know if there will be other opportunities to see the documentaries in their entirety.
