|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 9, 2009 |
Contact: |
Richard Schultz | 602.257.0335 x23 RSchultz@azhumanities.org |
AHC HOSTS FILMMAKERS OF NEW PBS
"GERONIMO" DOCUMENTARY
(Phoenix, AZ) – Kick off your First Fridays experience in Downtown Phoenix on April 3rd and meet the filmmakers of GERONIMO, part of the upcoming American Experience miniseries We Shall Remain. This new PBS documentary series focuses on key events and leaders in Native American history. This special outdoor sneak preview and talk-back session will take place on the lawn of the Arizona Humanities Council (AHC) headquarters at the historic Ellis-Shackelford House across from the Burton Barr Library on Central Avenue. The event begins at 7:00 p.m. with a screening of an excerpt from GERONIMO, followed by a discussion with filmmakers Dustinn Craig and Sarah Colt, who wrote, directed and produced this documentary. The event will be moderated by Wendy Weston, Director of American Indian Relations for the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Admission is free.
This event is part of a national community outreach campaign to complement the PBS broadcast of WE SHALL REMAIN, a groundbreaking mini-series and provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history. The fourth episode, Geronimo, is set at the end of the Indian Wars, near the close of the nineteenth century. Here, desperate times catapulted a controversial character to the leadership of an Apache band. To angry whites, Geronimo was an archenemy, the perpetrator of unspeakable savage cruelties. To some Apaches, he was a stubborn troublemaker whose actions needlessly brought the enemy’s wrath upon them. To his supporters, he remained the embodiment of proud resistance, leading the last Native American fighting force to surrender to the United States government. GERONIMO premieres May 4th on PBS.
Dustinn Craig, who is White Mountain Apache/Navajo, grew up in Arizona, living in White River on the Fort Apache reservation and later in Window Rock on the Navajo Reservation. As a teenager, Craig began making skateboarding videos of himself and his friends. But with fatherhood at age nineteen, Craig's desire to create "something I hoped my kids would see and watch some day," resulted in a production reflecting on family and tribal ties, for the national PBS series Matters of Race. His documentary Home has been shown as part of the Heard Museum exhibit "HOME: Native People in the Southwest" since 2005, and will continue to screen until 2010. Craig has worked on film projects for the John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Sarah Colt is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on PBS. In 2004, as a Pew International Journalism Fellow, Colt traveled to Namibia to investigate the racial imbalance of land ownership. In 2002, she co-produced the Emmy Award-winning series The Secret Life of the Brain. She is currently working on a film on the development of the polio vaccine for American Experience.
Wendy Weston was born and reared in the Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation in the community of T’iis Naasbaas. She has devoted her career to advocating for Native artists and having the Native voice represented in public arts and culture programs. She is an advocate for Native artistic expression, be it in traditional form or a progressive cutting edge genre. Her work with cultural and arts programming has served to increase the awareness of and respect for Native arts throughout the world. Weston has worked as a Curator and Presenter with artists and organizations from communities throughout North, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands, as well in Europe. Prior to joining the Heard staff in 1996, she served as Program Coordinator for Atlatl, Inc., national service organization for Native arts, and spent several years as a Roster Artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from Arizona State University and has completed graduate coursework in Museum Studies and Cultural Anthropology.
WE SHALL REMAIN debuts on April 13th on Eight, Arizona PBS; it is an AMERICAN EXPERIENCE production in association with Native American Public Telecommunications for WGBH Boston. Funding for WE SHALL REMAIN provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and Kalliopeia Foundation. Exclusive corporate funding for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, television’s most-watched history series, provided by Liberty Mutual. Major funding provided by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers. For more information about WE SHALL REMAIN, visit azpbs.org/weshallremain.
###
