Friday, November 3, 2017

'FU'! Jay Rosenblatt and Ellen Bruno on their Omnibus (Trump-inspired) Project 'Filmmakers Unite'

Merely a week after 9/11, San Franciscans Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi teamed up to address the national crisis, putting out a call to 150 of their fellow filmmakers to create short films or videos as a response to the mainstream media coverage. The result, Underground Zero, a feature-length omnibus consisting of 11 short works, went on to play on both HBO and the Sundance Channel (and with the participating filmmakers receiving an honorarium, along with $10K of the proceeds going to charity).

Now, over a decade and a half later, a new national crisis has emerged in the form of "a real threat to our democracy, to freedom of speech, and to civil rights," as Rosenblatt and collaborator Ellen Bruno put it in their recent call to (filmmaking) action. Reaching out to over 200 media-makers, the duo selected 13 shorts from more than 50 submissions to create Filmmakers Unite, a project that "documents diverse thoughts and feelings about the current state of our union," as they explained in their description of the project.


To read all about it visit Documentary magazine.

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