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Arctic Son Presents A Point of View

Published on August 21, 2007

Last summer, I came to Arts Engine, Inc./Big Mouth Films as a production intern. My first day on the job, I settled down to watch a film called Arctic Son. Little did I know that day that I would be transformed from just another audience member to an active participant in the outreach and distribution process of this truly unique film.

In Arctic Son, which brodcasts on P.O.V., "the Stans" share moments of both, icy tension and quiet reconnection..

Arctic Son, directed by Andrew Walton, tells the story of a father and son who are reunited in the remote arctic wilderness after a lifetime apart. For me, Arctic Son is a film of extremes. The subtleties of the documentary's story and characters are set against a backdrop of bold, undeniable beauty that is captivating.

After viewing it last summer, much of my internship revolved around the film. One of the most important tasks of my internship was submitting to film festival submissions around the world. As a film student, I was trained in the process of making films, ignorant to the efforts involved in extending a film's life beyond picture lock. Suddenly, I was discovering the world of outreach, distribution, festival runs, buzz words and the like. The film shined in its festival run for many months beyond my internship. Yet, the festival circuit can only take a film so far in terms of reach and audience. Sadly, the audiences that would benefit most from powerful non-fiction film never make it to the festivals.

Fast forward to January. I learned that this poignant film made the incredible leap of national broadcast. It caught the eye of programmers at P.O.V., PBS' award-winning showcase for independent nonfiction films. This year marks P.O.V.'s 20th anniversary, a true milestone considering how much the landscape of documentary film has changed over the last twenty years.

"As a filmmaker, you want to have your movie seen by an audience. Arctic Son had a very successful festival run and was seen all over the world, but finding a network that was the right fit and really understood the subtleties was a challenge. I was thrilled that P.O.V. came on board. Mainly because of their outreach efforts around their programming. It's really an honor when you consider that they only select so few films every season out," said Walton, Director of Arctic Son.

Since 1988, P.O.V. has broadcast 250 films. P.O.V. celebrates 20 years as a platform for independent non-fiction films.

I returned to Arts Engine to continue the efforts of Elizabeth Mandel, Producer of Arctic Son during her maternity leave. As Arctic Son lives out its broadcast premiere and DVD distribution process (available August 21 at www.artsengine.net/store), we felt it was timely to interview P.O.V. staff about the film and curatorial process. They are the oldest and most innovative forums for nonfiction film.

What follows are excerpts from conversations with Anne del Castillo, Manager of Research and Development; Yance Ford, Coordinating Producer; and Eliza Licht, Community Engagement and Education Senior Manager.

MediaRights.org: Can you describe the landscape in which P.O.V began? Why documentaries?

Anne del Castillo: When P.O.V started there really wasn't a place, or a dedicated series for independent documentaries. Marc Weiss, our founder, felt that public television had a mandate to preserve a space on their air waves to show these films. This was a pretty novel idea and at first people weren't sure if it was going to succeed or not. And here we are twenty years later.

The target was documentaries because through the sixties and seventies there was a sense of disenfranchisement. People were telling good stories that weren't aired at the time. News wasn't covering some of the major events at the time in terms of civil rights, Vietnam protests, etc...

The people doing these films were independent documentary filmmakers, and these powerful stories were only being seen by a handful of people--maybe just their closest friends or within small art-houses. And yet, these filmmakers were really giving an honest context for what was happening in the world at the time.

This still resonates today. For the most part, if you turn on the television you'll hear what is going on with Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan and not so much about what is creating the climate in which certain events are taking place today. And I think that is why people are turning to independent documentary. It is what they did in the beginning and it is why we continue to turn to documentary today.

MediaRights.org: What was P.O.V in 1988 and what is it now?

Anne del Castillo: In 1988 it was a little beacon of light for independent filmmakers to have a national broadcast. Just getting the films onto broadcast and being able to provide a national platform was a feat. I think where we are in 2008 is a natural extension of that. P.O.V has helped create a sense of excitement and enthusiasm and interest around documentaries. The fact that we can be around for twenty years is an amazing milestone for a television series in general, but much more so for a series that shows challenging work.

The town of Old Crow (population 300) is where Arctic Son takes place.

Before it was just about getting them on air, but today it is really about getting beyond the broadcast to extend the life of a film. We want to make sure that these efforts are not so much rewarded, as maximized. So that it is not just a time airing but a film that takes on a life for at least five to ten years beyond the broadcast.

MediaRights.org: Can you explain P.O.V.'s curatorial process?

Yance Ford: P.O.V is an acquisition series. As such, we hold an open call every year, soliciting works from around the country and the world, yielding 800-900 entries each year. We also travel to festivals and markets around the world to talk to filmmakers and distributors. Every year P.O.V. considers around 1,000 films for the series. Once we have everything in house, we spend a good portion of our summer screening and evaluating all the submissions that we received. Our programming team also works with a team of outside screeners who are professionals in the industry.

There are plenty of good films that aren't the right fit for P.O.V., and it's not always a question of separating the wheat from the chaff. It is about being able to watch a film and know if it fits within what we do as a series. We look for films that are character driven and take broader issues and funnel them through individual lives. We'll go from about 800 or 900 films to 35 or 40 films, which means that we're not doing anything other than screening films all summer long. We screen all day here, we screen at home and we screen on the weekends.

After our short list is set, we prepare for Editorial Committee, Ed Com for short. Ed Com is a four-day gathering of six PBS programmers and six media and independent film professionals. We bring them to New York, lock them in a room with myself, Chris White (P.O.V. Director of Production), Simon Kilmurry (P.O.V. Executive Director) and Cynthia Lopez (P.O.V. Vice President) acting as facilitators for the discussion and we cut the list from forty to twenty films. Roughly, the programmed series is the final list of films.

We are open to telling filmmakers their status in the process. The Editorial Committee is not a secret. It is a process we think is really democratic and beats having one person make all the programming decisions.

MediaRights.org: From a programmer's standpoint, what about Arctic Son made it stand out?

Yance Ford: As a programmer, I saw in Arctic Son generations of conflict between fathers and sons, but also the possibility of redemption and reconciliation embodied in the two characters. That kind of relationship is really hard to capture on film. Arctic Son very deftly--kind of--sits back and watches these two men orbit one another in a way that really resonated with the P.O.V. programming staff. The fact that Andrew really captured, not just the essence of their conflict, but also the moments of their reconnection really spoke to people.

It is also the kind of film that has enormous issues told through the lives of two everyday guys. An element that makes Arctic Son very unique is the way it looks at global warming and substance abuse -- two of the many issues in the film. It does it on a personal level. Sometimes I feel like those issues--going green, climate change, and carbon emissions--are so enormous that people almost tune out to them. When Stan says that he's worried about the ice giving away underneath their feet because the winters have gotten warmer, it is a regular guy living the consequences of global warming. The impact is on a very human scale.

MediaRights.org: The collaboration that happened between our team and P.O.V.'s community engagement team around the outreach campaign was incredible. Can you tell us more about that process?

Eliza Licht: We work really closely with the filmmakers to make this a mutual vision. We're not the experts on the issue; the filmmakers are.

At our first meeting with Andrew and Elizabeth, I asked, "Where would you like to see the film go? What audiences would you like to engage with this film? And what's already happened?" They were telling me about the amazing feedback Arctic Son has received at film festivals and with the Native American community and so, we began to talk about the directions we could go in for the P.O.V. campaign.

The landscape where Stanley and Stan Jr. were united after twenty years apart.

Specifically, for the outreach screenings, we have a number of organizations that we've been reaching out to over the years. There can be a kind of automatic connection between an organization and a film that comes to mind but we also look at past P.O.V. films with similar themes and consider the organizations that hosted screenings.

For example, Hardwood was a father-son story, the son had not grown up in the same country as the father, so for Arctic Son, we looked at organizations that had done screenings around Hardwood and we reached out to them.

MediaRights.org: What component of Arctic Son's community engagement plan are you most excited about and why?

Eliza Licht: Hard to say. I really like the discussion guide. In terms of the screenings, the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) screening is exciting because it involves New York City youth. This screening is part of Youth Views, P.O.V.'s youth engagement initiative that works with organizations to teach young people about the use of media in their communities.

The TFI Youth Screening Series kicks off with Arctic Son this September (check for more information Andrew will be at the screening and we're working to get someone from the American Indian Community House to speak afterwards as well.

MediaRights.org: Can you talk a little bit about the integration of outreach strategies into your programming?

Anne del Castillo: It all began with community screenings. The way that they came about was because many of the filmmakers that we were working with came from a community organizing background. They were already doing community outreach around their films just to get audiences in or to get an issue forward in the national dialogue.

The turning point was Silverlake Life in the early nineties. It came out at a time when AIDS was really an issue. Not many people were talking about it and this was a very personal story providing a human aspect to the impact of AIDS in America.

We began to reach out to organizations working with AIDS issues or those infected or affected by the disease. And this way of linking films to issues and issues to organizations became the model for our outreach initiatives.

The whole idea is that these films are really powerful films and that people can connect to them in different ways. And that has been the impetus for community engagement from day one.

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Founder's Statement by Marc Weiss:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/utils/aboutpov_history.html

Founder's Statement by Ellen Schneider:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/utils/aboutpov_history02.html

"Reflections on P.O.V." by Pat Aufderheide:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/utils/aboutpov_history03.html

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This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.