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POV Wins Four News & Documentary Emmy� Awards, Including Best Documentary for "Food, Inc."
By StudentFilmmakers.com
posted Oct 4, 2011, 09:17
"Food, Inc." a Double Winner; "Presumed Guilty" and "Good Fortune" Win Awards
"Food, Inc." a Double Winner; "Presumed Guilty" and
"Good Fortune" Win Awards
(New York) POV (Point of View) won four awards including Best Documentary at
the 32nd Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards, it was announced last
night by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Food, Inc.
won Best Documentary and Outstanding Informational Programming – Long
Form; Presumed Guilty won in the Outstanding Investigative Journalism –
Long Form category; and Good Fortune won for Outstanding Business and Economic
Reporting – Long Form. The three films aired during POV's 2010 season.
PBS won a total of six 2011 News & Documentary Emmys.
"Tonight's awards show the power of documentaries to shine a light on
vital, underreported issues," said Cynthia Lopez, POV's Co-Executive Producer.
"Food, Inc. exposed the shocking problems behind America's food production,
while Good Fortune unveiled the unintended consequences of international aid
in Africa, and Presumed Guilty took up the cause of a young man falsely imprisoned
in Mexico. That Antonio Zuniga, the young man from Presumed Guilty, is now free
and can be with us tonight, is a testament to the good that can come from dedicated
filmmakers who fought to bring their cameras into the courtroom."
These awards bring POV's Emmy total to 27, including a 2007 Special News &
Documentary Emmy Award for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking.
"As POV enters its 25th season on PBS in 2012, independent documentaries
continue to provide in-depth, valuable public information, often seen through
a personal lens," said Simon Kilmurry, POV's Executive Producer. "We
at POV believe that public media is the place where high-quality investigative
journalism takes center stage."
POV's News & Documentary Emmy Award-winning films:
Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner
How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve
to our families? Though our food appears the same as ever — a tomato still
looks like a tomato — it has been radically transformed. In the Academy
Award®-nominated blockbuster Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner
and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan
(The Omnivore's Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry, revealing
eye-opening facts about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as
a nation and where we may go from here.
Food, Inc. won Best Documentary prizes from the 2009 Gotham Awards, the Environmental
Media Awards, the Southeastern Film Critics Association Awards and the Washington,
D.C. Area Film Critics Association.
Director/Producer: Robert Kenner; Producer: Elise Pearlstein; CoProducers:
Richard Pearce, Eric Schlosser, Melissa Robledo; Executive Producers: Simon
Kilmurry, William Pohlad, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann; Co-Executive Producer,
American Documentary/POV: Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and Production,
American Documentary/POV: Chris White; Series Producer, American Documentary/POV:
Yance Ford; Coordinating Producer, American Documentary/POV: Andrew Catauro.
Presumed Guilty, a film by Roberto Hernandez and Layda Negrete; directed
by Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith
Imagine being picked up off the street, told you have committed a murder you
know nothing about and then finding yourself sentenced to 20 years in jail.
In December 2005 this happened to Tono Zuniga in Mexico City and, like thousands
of other innocent people, he was wrongfully imprisoned. Presumed Guilty is the
story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Zuniga. With no background
in film, Roberto Hernandez and Layda Negrete set about recording the injustices
they were witnessing, enlisting acclaimed director Geoffrey Smith (The English
Surgeon, POV 2009) to tell this dramatic story. The film is a co-presentation
with Latino Public Broadcasting.
After its POV broadcast, Presumed Guilty (Presunto Culpable in Spanish) created
a sensation in Mexico, where it opened in theaters in February 2011 and was
banned two weeks later when a witness from Zuniga's trial claimed the film invaded
his privacy. A judge subsequently overturned the ban, but the film had already
become the highest-grossing documentary in the country's history. Recently,
it was the first documentary to be broadcast on Mexican primetime television.
Presumed Guilty's numerous awards include 2010's IDA Humanitas Award; Best
Bay Area Documentary, San Francisco International Film Festival; Best Documentary,
Guadalajara International Film Festival; Best Documentary and Audience Award,
DocumentaMadrid; Audience Award and Best International Feature, Los Angeles
Film Festival; 2009's Amnesty International Award, Copenhagen International
Documentary Film Festival; and Best Documentary, Morelia International Film
Festival.
Directors: Roberto Hernandez, Geoffrey Smith; Producer: Layda Negrete; Executive
Producers: Simon Kilmurry, Patricia Boero; Co-Executive Producer, American Documentary/POV:
Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and Production, American Documentary/POV:
Chris White; Series Producer, American Documentary/POV: Yance Ford; Coordinating
Producer, American Documentary/POV: Andrew Catauro.
Good Fortune by Landon Van Soest
Good Fortune is a provocative exploration of how massive international efforts
to alleviate poverty in Africa may be undermining the very communities they
aim to benefit. In Kenya's rural countryside, Jackson's farm is being flooded
by an American investor who hopes to alleviate poverty by creating a multimillion-dollar
rice farm. Across the country in Nairobi, Silva's home and business in Africa's
largest shantytown are being demolished as part of a U.N. slum-upgrading project.
The gripping stories of two Kenyans battling to save their homes from large-scale
development present a unique opportunity see foreign aid through eyes of the
people it is intended to help.
Good Fortune previously won the Witness Award at the 2009 AFI/Discovery Silverdocs
Film Festival.
Director: Landon Van Soest; Producer: Jeremy Levine; Executive Producers: Simon
Kilmurry, Diana Barrett, Katy Chevigny, Judith Helfand, Andrew Herwitz; Co-Executive
Producer, American Documentary/POV: Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and
Production, American Documentary/POV: Chris White; Series Producer, American
Documentary/POV: Yance Ford; Coordinating Producer, American Documentary/POV:
Andrew Catauro.
Now in its 24th season on PBS, POV airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on PBS from June
to September, and features primetime specials during the year. POV has garnered
many other awards, including 13 George Foster Peabody Awards, 10 duPont-Columbia
Broadcast Journalism Awards, three Academy Awards®, the Prix Italia, the
Webby, the IDA Award for Best Continuing Series and the National Association
of Latino Independent Producers' 2011 Award for Corporate Commitment to Diversity.
Resources:
http://www.pbs.org/pov
http://www.emmyonline.tv
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