JANUARY 2011 focus on film


Nicholas Kristof: Reporting from the World….and Westchester New York Times Columnist Recently Screens Congo


Documentary at The Picture House By Jim Ormond


The phrase “shock and awe” could just as easily be applied to Nicolas D. Kristof’s journalism as it is to military strategy. Reading one of his recent columns in The New York Times, for example, you’ll learn that war has claimed the lives of seven million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in just ten years, or that, in several nations, women endure lives of slave- like status.


Kristof exemplifies the maxim that the role of the journalist is to ‘comfort the afflicted’ and ‘afflict the comfortable,’ and his unflinching dispatches confront the conscience of an international community that he feels is either completely ignorant of, or willfully apathetic to, these realities.


He not only shares harrowing statistics, he contextualizes these problems, and often humanizes a crisis by distilling it through the lens of one individual’s story.


based Picture House, Westchester’s newest non- profit film venue.


Directed by Eric Daniel Metzgar and Produced by Mikaela Beardsley and Steven Cantor, Reporter tracks Kristof’s work covering the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with two student journalists. The student journalists were along as part of Kristof’s “Win a Trip” contest that he announces each year in his column.


"As reporters, we are good at covering what happened yesterday, but not at what is happening everyday."


Kristof and his wife Sheryl Wu Dunn moved to China right after their wedding, and while they have reported from dozens of countries across four continents in the intervening decades, they now call Westchester County home.


Together, they received a Pulitzer Prize for their reports from China, including their accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of student protesters. Later Kristof’s coverage of the humanitarian crisis boiling unnoticed in the Darfur region of Sudan was instrumental in bringing global attention to the problem.


“Raising awareness can have results” says Kristof. “There are still people being slaughtered in Darfur, but hundreds of thousands are alive today, who would have been killed, had it not been for the press coverage and subsequent international involvement in the region.”


This reporter/advocate welcomes any opportunity to advance the issues that are important to him. Recently, such an opportunity was a screening and discussion of the recent film Reporter at the Pelham-


Of his local


Kristof has long recognized a systemic blindspot in journalism that has existed for some time. “As reporters, we are good at covering what happened yesterday, but not at what is happening everyday,” he says. “Often, by focusing on today’s headlines, we ignore the failures in basic nutrition, education, and efforts to combat disease, that shape people’s lives. I’m asking the students that accompany me


on these trips to chronicle these more fundamental aspects of the societies we are trying to understand.”


film center, Kristof says, “ …places


like The Picture House are important because they provide a forum where visiting speakers can open a new window on global issues. We need these kinds of places which can knit a community together and help us to begin a new conversation.”


Adds the Picture House Executive Director, Jennifer Christman, "Nick’s columns shine a light on voices and faces that are too often ignored by the media, and subsequently by the general public.”


To learn more about The Picture House’s upcoming programs, visit www.thepicturehouse.org.


Find out more about Nicholas Kristof by visiting www.half theskymovement.


A scene from Reporter, a documentary that followed Nicholas Kristof's reporting from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo by Will Okun


org. This is the companion web- site to Kristof’s most recent book, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn, entitled Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.


Rebecca Cammisa Photo by: Will Ragozzino - Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival '09


Oscar Nominated Rebecca Cammisa Gives Voice to Migrants By Alison Kattleman


“I think what really goes on in the world is far more interesting than a lot of the fiction films that are created,” says Rebecca Cam- misa, Westchester-based documentary filmmaker.


Critics and audiences are certainly intrigued by Ms. Cammisa’s nonfic- tion explorations as well. Her 2009 documentary Which Way Home, which chronicles the journeys of several children migrating


across the border from Mexico seeking prosper- ity in the United States, was nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, and was screened this fall at the Jacob Burns Film Center.


Through a friend, Ms. Cammisa became intrigued by the stories of child migrants, a topic she had known little about before making her second film Which Way Home. The film took nearly seven years to complete due to lack of funding. With a combination of grants, including a 2006 Fulbright Fellowship and John Malkovich, Lianne Halfon and Russell Smith stepping in as executive producers, the documentary was made possible and aired on HBO. With the film, Ms. Cammisa hoped to “give a voice to people who normally no one cares to talk to.”


“Immigrants are marginalized,” she says. “They’re a political football in a divisive issue. It’s important for people to see that these are human beings struggling to get a better life.”


Cammisa’s cameras take viewers on every step of the journey.


The kids in the film, who range in age from nine to seventeen, travel alone or in small groups and without adult guidance, often hidden on top of freight train cars. Cammisa’s cameras take viewers on every step of the journey. Though the kids at times project confidence, the dangers for them are numerous and their lives are constantly at risk.


“Our attachment to them goes on to this day,” says Ms. Cammisa of the children in the film. She and her team continue efforts to help them, working with the National Center for Refugee and Immi- grant Children.


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