American Filmmaker

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins lives in Boulder, CO, where he works as a bookseller and runs Trident Press. He is the author of "Cactus," a novella. His creative work has appeared in Triquarterly, Noncanon Press, Keep This Bag Away From Children, decomP magazinE, Pithead Chapel, Timber Journal, and others. Pest House published his chapbook, Acknowledgement (2014), and he is the recipient of the High Country News’s 2014 Bell Prize.

Nate reads some of the stories from "The Way Cities Feel To Us Now" published by Maudlin House and talks about his work at Trident Press, traveling to Mexico to write for a month, and some of the inspirations for his collection of short stories.

Ivy & Ivan MacDonald are a brother and sister filmmaking duo from the Blackfeet tribe of Northern Montana.  Currently, they're working on "When They Were Here," a feature documentary about the serial disappearances and murders of indigenous woman across Montana.  Ivy and Ivan are based out of Missoula, Montana.  Ivy and Ivan talk about the process of filming a story that's extremely close to their personal lives and going after financing for the film.  "When They Were Here" was chosen by the Big Sky Film Institute's Native Filmmaker Initiative and their fellowship program to help find and develop Native films and filmmakers.

Ivy and Ivan are finishing up a demo reel to find the final financing for the film. 

Leslie Simmer of Kartemquin Films talks about the journey to edit social justice motivated documentary films and docu-series.  Leslie Simmer is Kartemquin's Director of Editing as well as Senior Editor on staff.

For over 19 years Leslie has worked at Kartemquin in various capacities. She is currently working on the multi-part series America to Me. Her most recent project before that was Raising Bertie, which she edited and co-wrote, and which premiered at Full Frame in 2016. Leslie edited and co-wrote the Emmy Award-winning film, The Homestretch, which world premiered at Hot Docs 2014 and screened on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2015. She edited and co-wrote the Emmy-nominated feature documentary As Goes Janesville, a co-production between Kartemquin and 371 Productions which screened on PBS Independent Lens in October, 2012. She also edited with Steve James on the ESPN film No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson. She edited the Emmy-nominated In the Family (Best Editing, "Best of the Midwest Awards”). In 2005, Leslie was co-editor with Steve James on The War Tapes. From 2001-2004 she wore dual hats on the seven-part PBS series The New Americans as both Series Story Editor and Post Production Supervisor. Prior to putting on her editing hat full-time, Leslie worked in various different production and post-production roles on a number of Kartemquin Films, including Stevie, Refrigerator Mothers, 5 Girls, and Vietnam: Long Time Coming. Leslie got her BA in Communication/Theater Arts (Phi Beta Kappa) from Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She did graduate work in film at Columbia College, Chicago, where she began her long and passionate relationship with the Avid. When not in the edit room, she enjoys travel, music, good food and liquor, snorkeling (and beaches in general), and helping animals.

Deo Cardoso is a Brazilian-American filmmaker completing his first feature film, "Cabeça de Nego", and starting the international film festival circuit.  He talks about the reality of living in Brazil as a filmmaker, getting his film financed by the Brazilian Film Council's first affirmative action grant to support minority filmmakers, the obstacles of telling a story about the educational reality of a corrupt and under-funded educational system, finishing his film under a new political regime that's trying to eliminate the Brazilian Film Council, and finding a World Premiere for his film to help it find a global audience.

Deo's film, "Cabeça de Nego" (English translation "A Brother's Mind"), tells the story of a young student, inspired by the example of the Black Panthers, decides to protests the racist and under funded school he attends.  The story was inspired by one of the schools in Deo's neighborhood and the kids he meet that were protesting the school's corruption.

This episode is special because Deo Cardoso is the first international filmmaker whose been on the podcasts.  Deo's film will start the film festival circuit in late 2019/early 2020 and we'll be doing more episodes with Deo as he brings this extremely special film to audiences around.

Gordon Quinn and Josh Hyde talk about the history of “cinéma vérité,” Kartemquin starting as a filmmaking collective, being the muse for Bob Dylan's song "Quinn the Eskimo" (“The Mighty Quinn”), helping create Hoop Dreams and Minding The Gap, the mission to empower filmmakers, and maneuvering today's distribution reality (streaming, theatrical, and TV) with powerful documentaries that leave distributors "in awe at the power of cinema."

Artistic Director and founding member of Kartemquin Films, Gordon Quinn has been making documentaries for over 50 years. Roger Ebert called his first film Home for Life (1966), "an extraordinarily moving documentary." With this film, Gordon established the direction he would take for making “vérité” films investigating and critiquing society by documenting the lives of real people. Gordon created a legacy of inspiration for filmmakers and a home where they can make high-quality, social-issue documentaries. Gordon was the executive producer for Hoop Dreams (1994), about 2 inner-city high school basketball players for 5 years as they pursue their NBA dreams. (Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Chicago Film Critics Award – Best Picture, Los Angeles Film Critics Association – Best Documentary, & Academy Award Nomination) 

Other Gordon Quinn films include: Vietnam, Long Time Coming, Golub, 5 Girls, Refrigerator Mothers and Stevie.  He executive produced Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita and The New Americans. He produced, In The Family, about the human consequences of genetic medicine and executive produced Milking the Rhino, about community-based conservation in Africa, and At The Death House Door on a wrongful execution.  As a director, he completed Prisoner of Her Past, a Holocaust survivor suffering from late-onset PTSD, and co-directed the 2011 release A Good Man, about the dancer Bill T. Jones. '63 Boycott, directed by Gordon about the 1963 Chicago Public Schools Boycott. (2017 Chicago Int’l Film Festival, MOMA’s 2018 Doc Fortnight, 2018 Pan African Arts + Film Festival – Audience Award for Best Documentary Short, Short-listed for a 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short)

Gordon’s recent films as executive producer include Minding the Gap (2019 Academy Award nominee, Best Documentary), the America to Me series, Edith+Eddie (2018 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short), Keep Talking and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2018 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary). Gordon has won many awards, including 3 Emmy awards, the 2015 Int’l Documentary Association (IDA) Career Achievement Award, the Hot Springs Documentary Festival's 2014 Career Achievement Award; the 2015 Houston Cinema Arts Festival Special Tribute Award, the CIMMfest’s 2016 BAADASSSSS Award for career achievement in movies and music and the 2016 St. Louis Int’l Film Festival's Maysles Brothers Lifetime Achievement Award.

Keri Pickett is an award-winning artist and producer/director/cinematographer of the documentary First Daughter and the Black Snake, a feature film following environmental activist Winona LaDuke and her family and communities efforts to keep big oil out of her tribe’s sacred wild rice territory. 

The film has been nominated for many documentary feature film awards and it won "Best MN Made Documentary Feature" at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and "Best Feature Film" from the Portland EcoFilm Fest. 

Keri also created the feature documentary film, The Fabulous Ice Age, the winner of an audience award at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and best non-feature film and best non-feature director awards from both the Women’s Indie Film Festival and the Gwinnett International Film Festival. The film spans a century of dancing on ice and the skating pioneers who changed the world with one show skaters’ quest to ensure their history is not forgotten. The film is streaming on Netflix in 10 languages.  

Keri Picket is most well known as a photographer, her career started in 1983 when legendary NYC Village Voice Director of Photography Fred McDarrah gave Pickett an internship at the newspaper where she worked until the late 80’s when she left NYC. Photos of the intimate moments of her grandparents daily life while in their mid 90’s is put together in her book Love in the 90s, BB and Jo, The Story of a Lifelong Love, a Granddaughter’s Portrait by Keri Pickett (Warner Books, 1995). The book pairs photos of BB and Jo’s daily life with excerpted letters from their year-long postal courtship from the late 1920s and was published with a miraculous printing of 150,000 copies. Gender play unites a community in the book Faeries (Aperture, 2000) which won the Lambda Literary Award for best art book of 2000. Faeries pairs photos and interviews exploring values of the ‘radical faeries’ at their retreat place in the Northwoods. Keri also documented the life work of Mary Jo Copeland as she provides food and shelter at her faith-based organization in the book Saving Body & Soul, The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland. Pickett’s photographs are in International and National Museums. She has been awarded fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight, Jerome and Target Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Her pictures have appeared in Life, Time and People magazines as well as Stern and Geo. Pickett is a 2017 McKnight Foundation Fellow in Media Arts. 

Keri Picket and Josh Hyde talk about being a young photographer in 1980’s New York, her lifelong friendship with Winona LaDuke which evolved into the film First Daughter and the Black Snake, how to defend sacred land from the construction of an oil pipeline, connecting two Native American activists (Alex White Plume and Winona LaDuke), her journey to sit in ceremony with the Lakota, and her newest project made in partnership with the group Film Fatales founded by Leah Meyerhoff.

Marie Cheng talks about choosing to be a story teller over going to business school, the long journey through film school, playing the intern and production assistant game, working hard as a core value, how to find the right creative community in Hollywood, how to teach yourself to write scripts, learning improv at Upright Citizens Brigade and how to write animated TV scripts for DreamWorks and Nickelodeon. Some of Marie's past credits include working on shows like The Adventures of Puss and Boots and Harvey Girls Forever! on Netflix.  

Marie Cheng is a comedy writer-performer based in Los Angeles. As the first in her family born in the U.S., she gravitates toward fish-out-of-water stories and good boba. She grew up in Huntington Beach, CA, and graduated from Chapman's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts with a BFA in Animation. She also studied abroad in Florence, Italy, and won't stop talking about it. 

She loves curly fries and animals that look like bread. Here is a link to Marie's award-wining senior thesis film, Volcano!, just for fun. For more fun and storytelling, please follow Marie Cheng's Instagram.

Brian Newman talks about producing independent films, transitioning to working with brands on distribution strategy for branded content films, how to be diversified as a producer and how basic analytics can help a film release.  

Brian Newman is the founder of Sub-Genre.  He consults on content development, financing, distribution and marketing to help connect brands and filmmakers with audiences. Clients include: Patagonia, REI, Keen, Yeti Coolers, New York Times, Sonos, Sundance, Vulcan Productions and Zero Point Zero.  Brian is also the producer of the upcoming The Ground Between Us, The Outside Story, and Love & Taxes.  He also served as executive producer of Shored Up, The Invisible World and Remittance.

Brian has served as CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, president of Renew Media (known for the Rockefeller Fellowships) and executive director of IMAGE Film & Video (producers of the Atlanta Film Festival). Brian serves on the advisory board of the Camden International Film Festival. He was born in North Carolina and has an MA in Film Studies from Emory University.

Brian is a frequent keynote speaker on branded content and the future of film and new media. He is known as a serial entrepreneur and leader in the film industry, having led: the merger of Renew Media and the Tribeca Film Institute, combining two nonprofits into a leading media center, the launch of the Reframe Project to digitize and make accessible thousands of “stuck on the shelf” films, the start-up, Flicklist, an app to help people find the best films to watch, and development of the Sundance Institute’s Transparency Project, an effort to aggregate and make available the financial data on hundreds of indie films.

He has served on the boards of Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media (GFEM, now Media Impact Funders, as Vice Chair and Treasurer); Muse Film & Television, Rooftop Films (Chair) and IndieCollect (Co-Founding Board Member).

Colby Gottert is an Emmy Award-winning producer and cinematographer whose films have been broadcast on HBO, CBS, ESPN, AT&T Audience, Fox Television and PBS, including limited theatrical releases.

A prolific, creative producer known for his ability to manage multiple crews and projects simultaneously worldwide, his wide range of credits include the critically acclaimed feature documentaries and series: Voyage of the Vezo (PBS); Life Out of Balance (World Bank); Youngstown Boys (ESPN 30 for 30). Nossa Chape (SXSW Film Festival, Fox Sports Films); Momentum Generation (Audience Award Tribeca Film Festival, HBO); Give Us This Day (AT&T Audience); and the episodic series Phenoms (Fox Sports 1) and Home for the Holidays (CBS Television).

Co-founder of Digital Development Communications (DDC), the development industry’s leading documentary production company for the past 15 years, with offices in North Carolina, Washington DC and Colombia, DDC has established production capabilities in over 75 countries worldwide.

On this episode, Colby talks about learning filmmaking through instinct, how to find the right opportunities as you evolve as a filmmaker, building an international and multi-lingual team and the constant struggle to create original content like the Remastered Docu-Series on Netflix.

Chris Hunt is a comic book creator, writer and artist. Currently residing in his hometown of Westerville, Ohio, he arrived back there after 19 years in Boise, Idaho and 3 years in New York City. Inspired as a 9-year old boy to pursue comics as a full time career, it took him almost 20 years to finally fulfill the dream. His first full length graphic novel, CARVER: A Paris Story debuted from Z2 Comics as a limited series to great acclaim in late 2015, eventually garnering "2016 Graphic Novel of The Year" from IGN.com.

Chris has worked for AMC, IDW Comics, Universal Music Group, Fat Possum Records as an artist, and has additionally lent his writing talent to Vertigo Comics alongside his friend and mentor, Paul Pope whom, Hunt studied under at The Atlantic Center for The Arts.

Chris’s freelance work ranges from special creative services for brands like Filson to the graphic novel, Eden: A Skillet Graphic Novel, for the band Skillet.

The music used in this episode comes from the feature documentary film, American Hemp.