Thursday, March 1
7.00 Pm
Landmark E Street Cinema
$10 in advance HERE or at the door
DC Premiere
Screens with Shining Night: A Portrait of Morten Lauridsen 2012 / 73 mins / Switzerland and USA / directed by Michael Stillwater
A rural, American family in the 1930’s is rattled by the home birth of a severely disabled child. When the young daughter, herself disabled, sees her father’s disappointment, she attempts to fix the baby in the barn.
Director’s Statement: The topic of this film, disability, is very close to me. I began making documentary films about disability ten years ago with my best friend, Victor Pineda, who has muscular dystrophy. We travelled the world documenting stories that are often heartbreaking and inspirational at the same time; from the paralympic team in Tunis to beauty queens in Caracas to survivors of the Tsunami in Phuket, the people I encounter challenge the way I think and live. The films have played around the world, but the audiences are limited. I want to bring these issues into mainstream film. ‘Angels’ is a movie that turns our current paradigm on it’s head. It will haunt audiences.
Zachary Kerschberg was born in rural West Virginia, USA, where he lived for seven years before moving to Northern California. He earned his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Romance Languages and Literature and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University. He has spent almost a third of his life living abroad in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, France, Italy, Korea, Oman, Thailand, Tunisia, the UAE and Venezuela. His documentary films on disability have screened at the United Nations, the World Bank and the Paralympics in Athens, Greece. He was a Fulbright fellow to Dubai in 2009, where he taught screenwriting and documentary filmmaking at the Dubai Men’s College. Currently he is a degree candidate in the graduate film department at NYU.
