Film

Filming the Frontlines: Jordan Campbell’s Journey Into Ukraine

Anna Tolette — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:44:53 +0000

Filming the Frontlines: Jordan Campbell’s Journey Into Ukraine Anna Tolette Tue, 11/12/2024 - 13:44

Audrea Lin

Journalist, photographer and filmmaker Jordan Campbell (Comm’91) is no stranger to the harshness of international conflict. He has reported from South Sudan, Libya and Iraq for publications like National Geographic and Men's Journal. He also founded Ramro Global, a film production company that documents the work of global health and humanitarian initiatives.

But his latest project, an upcoming documentary titled Ukraine Under Fire, is a personal labor — the origins and experiences of which are unlike anything he’s ever undertaken.

International storytelling

After graduating from CU, Campbell started working with outdoor company Marmot as a communications director. Always one to seek out new and interesting perspectives, he befriended a few of the company’s international representatives, becoming close to his Ukrainian colleagues Iryna Karagan and Pavlo Vasianoych.

Over the course of the next decade, Campbell found himself drawn to bigger stories, fueled by his university training in storytelling, geopolitics and political science. His career segued into global journalism and film.

Still, he remained friends with Karagan and Vasianoych. And when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he quickly reached out to Karagan. Concerned, he asked if she would flee. Karagan’s answer was resolved: Not only was she staying put, she was staying “to defend our country.”

Her determination highlighted what Campbell saw as “the most incredible injustice, a David and Goliath story — of resistance, resilience and the quest for freedom, democracy and European integration.”

Documenting conflict

A month later, Campbell crossed the Polish border heading to Kiev, his camera in tow and post-apocalyptic sirens blaring. “It was a ghost town,” he remembered. In areas near Bucha that Ukrainian soldiers had just liberated from Russia, he saw evidence of violence alongside the burnt remains of tanks, buildings and cars.

He returned again that summer and embedded at a military hospital in Pokrovsk, a grisly scene of battered and injured soldiers. “It was a life-changing event,” he said. Campbell decided that the footage he shot would become part of a film, Ukraine Under Fire, that documents Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s resilience, and includes Karagan and Vasianoych as subjects.

Between visits, Campbell spoke up about what he had seen. At the U.S. Senate Building, he presented before an audience of global politicians during the Parliamentary Intelligence Security Forum, speaking about Russia’s use of cluster bombs on civilian targets and what he believed was evidence of war crimes and genocide.

“What he’s doing by humanizing the conflict encourages people to take an interest and support the cause of the Ukrainian people,” said Dan Martinez, a retired Foreign Service Officer and Ramro Global advisory board member who facilitated Campbell’s participation.

Despite the inherent risks, Campbell continued to return to Ukraine, mitigating the dangers by following a few simple rules: “Make the best decisions you can possibly make, given where you are and who you're with,” and, “Pick the people you're going to be with very carefully.”

One such person he shadowed was Peter Fouché, a South African combat medic. During a frigid morning in early 2023, the two men patrolled a quiet hamlet near the front line, peering up at the sky for incoming drones. Fouché, burly and hardened, a Rambo-like figure cradling an AK-47, emerged from the broken shell of a little stone house. Then, he broke into tears.

“The West will be remembered for what they have done or have not done in this war,” Fouché said, staring directly into Campbell’s lens.

Capturing reality

The summer of 2023 was Campbell’s fifth visit to Ukraine — one he now describes as “disastrous.” He was with Fouché at the time, and their nerves were shot from exhaustion, PTSD and a relentless, soggy heat. He didn’t know it, but it would be the last time he’d see his friend.

As Campbell made plans to return, to embed with Fouché and his Ukrainian colleague Tatyana Millard, he learned that the two were killed near the frontlines. The duo were evacuating injured soldiers from the combat zone “like a superhero team,” Campbell said.

“That’s Peter’s essence right there,” Campbell remarked weeks after Fouché’s death, while reflecting on the footage he captured of the heroic medic and his piercing statement about the West’s role in the war. “That's the power of documentary film. It's that close.”

Campbell’s documentary, Ukraine Under Fire, is set to release in December 2024.

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Photos courtesy Oleg Avilov

In 2022, journalist, photographer and filmmaker Jordan Campbell (Comm’91) headed to Ukraine to report on the war. Now, he’s sharing his experiences in his documentary, Ukraine Under Fire.

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Fall 2024

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Wakanda Forever Actress Aba Arthur

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Wakanda Forever Actress Aba Arthur Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/06/2023 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Aba Arthur (PolSci, Thtr’05) of Atlanta is a performer, writer and owner of production company The Ohemaa Project. She caught her big break with her role as a naval engineer in charge of a ship in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Arthur filmed her role in October 2021 but shot into the spotlight a year later with the Nov. 11 release of the blockbuster, which spent five weeks at No. 1 in the box office and grossed more than $400 million in that time frame. Next year, catch her in the Oprah Winfrey-adapted film The Color Purple. Read a full interview with Arthur here.

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Photo courtesy Aba Arthur

Learn what it is like on set of one of 2022's biggest hit films.

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Spring 2023

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Boulder Is the Happiest City in the U.S. … For Some

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Boulder Is the Happiest City in the U.S. … For Some Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Sarah Kuta

In a documentary filmmaking class during her junior year at CU, Katrina Miller (Jour’07) made a short movie about her friend, a Black student who’d received a racially charged letter threatening her to step down from her post as student body president. Miller’s video didn’t make it out of the classroom (though her peers did give her a standing ovation), but Miller never forgot the pride and passion she felt drawing attention to injustice.

Now, 15 years later, Miller is once again using documentary film as a vehicle for social change. Miller, along with Beret Strong (Engl’83) and John Tweedy (Engl’82), are sparking important conversations about race and inclusion with their film This Is [Not] Who We Are, which explores the disconnect between Boulder's self-proclaimed commitment to diversity and Black residents’ lived experiences. Though National Geographic may have named Boulder the happiest city in America in 2017, that description is more true for some residents than others, the filmmakers argue.

“A big reason why I got into film and video is because of the storytelling aspect,” said Miller. “It can be a great influencer, and I’ve always known that there are certain issues in the world I want to address and the best medium to do that, for me, was film.”

The film centers on a recent incident that made headlines around the world: In March 2019, Boulder police officer John Smyly confronted and, ultimately, pointed his gun at Zayd Atkinson, a Black man and a student at Naropa University who was picking up trash outside of his dorm as part of his work-study job. When demonstrators took to the streets to show support for Atkinson and protest racism, the filmmakers grabbed their cameras and got to work.

But the movie goes much deeper than this moment, exploring how Boulder’s earliest history made it nearly impossible for people of color to succeed in the idyllic city in the shadow of the Flatirons. Featuring historical context and emotional interviews with present-day Black residents of Boulder — including children and teens grappling with racist bullies at school — This Is [Not] Who We Are shows another side of a city that views itself as progressive.

“We still have people who really believe that Boulder is just this perfect town, who believe that what happened to Zayd was an isolated incident, so I want to reach every single resident somehow, some way,” Miller said. “Everyone really needs to open their eyes to all the truths of their community so we can fix it.”

Despite the documentary’s bleak outlook, the filmmakers remain optimistic, due in large part to the positive reception of the film so far. This Is [Not] Who We Are won a prestigious People’s Choice Award when it premiered at the Boulder International Film Festival in March, and after the screening, scores of people eagerly participated in a call-to-action discussion session.

Now, the creators are fielding requests to screen the film in Boulder and beyond; they’re also creating accompanying study guides to help people understand and discuss the themes depicted in the film.

“[The positive reaction] makes me want to work even harder toward fixing these problems, and I’m feeling that same sense of energy and responsibility from audiences,” said Miller. “It feels like they are jumping on this train with me after watching the film and hearing the stories.”

They hope that after viewing the film, people will feel motivated to take action or start down a path of self-education, however they feel compelled to — whether that’s by joining the Boulder County branch of the NAACP, reading books on white privilege, having difficult conversations about race and ethnicity or something else entirely. More broadly, they hope as many people as possible will view the documentary and “join us in trying to be the community that we want to be,” Miller said.

“Film is the tool you can use to help other people say what they need to say,” said Strong. “It’s a facilitation. And then you make it beautiful, you hope, so that lots of people are moved by it and want to engage with it. And then you see if it can help galvanize dialogue and maybe some positive action.”

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Learn more at thisisnotwhowearefilm.com.

Photos stills from This Is Not Who We Are

Filmmakers Katrina Miller, Beret Strong and John Tweedy created a new documentary that’s inspiring important conversations about race and inclusion.

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Summer 2022

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What It’s Like To Be the Financial Guru for the Sundance Institute

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:00:00 +0000

What It’s Like To Be the Financial Guru for the Sundance Institute Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/05/2021 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Michelle Johnson Anderson (Acct’97) is chief financial officer of the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit focused on supporting those in independent film and theater founded by Robert Redford (A&S ex’58; HonDocHum’87) in 1981. Michelle has worked for the institute for 15 years, and her primary focus is financial planning and reporting financial results — including the annual budget and festival ticket sales — to internal and external stakeholders.

Do you attend the festival each year?

We have offices in Los Angeles, New York and Park City, where I’m based. The finance department is an important piece of the overall festival, which I’m fortunate to attend. In addition to the flagship Sundance Film Festival, we also partner with organizations in London and Jakarta to produce film festivals, which sadly I do not attend.

Is there a film that premiered through the festival that is a particular favorite for you over the years?

That’s a tough question! I’m particularly fond of Whale Rider and Sing Street.

What is another Sundance program you are proud of outside of the festival?

A few years ago, we developed our ‘Co//ab’ platform for creators. We want artists from around the world to learn from each other and from Sundance advisors and staff, develop and share work in progress and connect in a creative community dedicated to storytelling and elevating independent voices. This platform became critical for us as we had to pivot to online programming due to the COVID pandemic.

Have you met Robert Redford?

I have met Robert Redford on a few occasions throughout my time at Sundance. He’s passionate about the arts and the environment, and had the incredible vision to found the Sundance Institute 40 years ago to support artists of different disciplines.

What is one of your favorite stories from your career?

On the first Saturday (day three) of the festival in 2017, everything that could go wrong did. First, we had a denial of service attack on our network that delayed the morning opening of all our venues while our technology team rerouted our service. Second, we had a major snowstorm that shut down the interstate between Salt Lake and Park City, stranding our staff and patrons. And lastly, there was the Women’s March on Main Street in Park City that brought out so many people that the central corridor of the city was completely gridlocked for hours. But through it all, our amazing team rallied, and the show went on!

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Photo courtesy Michelle Johnson Anderson

Michelle Anderson is chief financial officer of the Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford.

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Fall 2021

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Infinite: From self-published book to movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Infinite: From self-published book to movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/02/2021 - 00:00

Helen Olsson

In 2010, Rafi Crohn picked up a paperback called The Reincarnationist Papers in a hostel in Nepal. On the first page, author D. Eric Maikranz (Russ’91) offered a cash reward to any reader who could help get the book made into a Hollywood movie.

As an assistant to a movie producer, Crohn was instantly intrigued by both the proposal and the book’s puzzle-box plot.

Part sci-fi thriller, part mystery and part historical fiction, the novel follows a shadowy society called the Cognomina made up of reincarnated individuals with total recall of their past lives.

“They’re very cosmopolitan and educated people who’ve led very enriched lives,” Maikranz said. “Some characters go back 10 or 20 lives.”

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WWEOCQGxSw]

How the self-published paperback found its way to Nepal remains a mystery. At the time, there were only a thousand copies in circulation.

“I had no idea if it would work,” said Maikranz. “It’s even more mind-blowing that Rafi found it halfway around the world.”

The idea sprung from Maikranz’s work as a programmer at Oracle, which often uses collaboration and customer input to improve its products. “Essentially, I crowdsourced my readers to become my agents,” he said.

And — it worked. Crohn and Maikranz paired up on a quest for a movie deal.

For the next nine years, Crohn championed the book in what would be a rollercoaster ride of emotions. They’d get a nibble from a production company one month, an option here, a producer interested there. Right when it seemed like a done deal, the project would get shelved. Finally, in 2017, it sold to Paramount. The film, titled Infinite, stars Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor and was released on Paramount+ in June.

In 2019, Maikranz traveled to an abandoned Victorian mansion-turned-movie-set in England to see the filming of Infinite and to meet Wahlberg between takes.

“I was absolutely terrified. I speak in front of thousands of people for work; I don’t really rattle. But I couldn’t even hold a cup of tea,” said Maikranz. “Wahlberg said to me, ‘Eric, I hope to make you proud of my portrayal of your character.’ I was floating like a butterfly.”

Maikranz gained inspiration for this unique adventure through a combination of travel, historical study and personal experience.

After graduating from CU, Maikranz moved to Italy to serve as a foreign correspondent. On the side, he gave tours of the Coliseum and the Forum, bringing the past to life through historical characters.

“Every generation has its Kardashians and Clintons,” he said. “That was killer training for storytelling on the page.”

Maikranz also found inspiration for the novel through his own curiosity about reincarnation.

“I have three memories that don’t belong to me,” he said. “The oldest one is from around 1880. I’m a little boy holding a man’s hand as we watch huge black steam locomotives pull up to the tracks.”

Does he believe in reincarnation? “I don’t have a strong metaphysical stance on it. I don’t necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it.”

Maikranz also credits his time at the university.

“In a way, I’m equipped to write this novel because the 22-year-old version of me went to CU and studied the Russian giants.”

He is inspired by the idea that even in our current existence, we’re different people at different parts of our lives.

With the release of Infinite, Maikranz plans to take a six- to 12-month leave of absence from Oracle to focus on writing — and to take time for dropping in on Zoom book clubs. The second book in the series, The Cognomina Chronicles, is in the works.

“After 30 years, I’m finally getting to use my degree in literature to the fullest,” he said.

Connect with Maikranz on Facebook and Twitter.

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Photo courtesy Paramount+

D. Eric Maikranz propelled his book to the silver screen with guerilla marketing.

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Humor’s Secret Source

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 20:00:00 +0000

Humor’s Secret Source Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2018 - 13:00

Jim Scott

Filmmaker Ken Burns, renowned for the documentaries The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and others, elicited gales of laughter from a sellout CU crowd in October and walked away with the Center for the American West’s highest honor.

The Macky Auditorium audience chuckled when the Emmy winner spoke of critics who admit they’ve never watched his films and of people who yearn for the simplicity of the 1930s and 1940s — decades, he cheerfully points out, that delivered the world’s worst economic downturn and deadliest war.

But there were also somber strains in the filmmaker’s 90-minute live conversation with Patty Limerick, faculty director of CU’s Center of the American West. They included Burns’ anguish after the death of his mother when he was a child, the racial inequality that dogs our nation and the extraordinary emotional pain suffered by Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt, both subjects of Burns films.

"The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow."

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow, ” he said, quoting Twain. “There is no humor in heaven.”

The center honored Burns with its Wallace Stegner Award, given annually to individuals who have made sustained contributions to the cultural identity of the West.

The Oct. 2 event kicked off with big-screen snippets of Burns’ work, more than 30 films in all. Some of the loudest applause followed clips centered on the American West from The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and The Dust Bowl.

His 2017 film continues to spark intense conversations across the nation, including voices of previously silent veterans. That film includes three photographs taken by Michael Kodas, deputy director of CU’s Center for Environmental Journalism, as he followed U.S. Vietnam veterans returning to their fire bases in Vietnam in the late 1980s.

Near the end of the evening, the audience joined in a rendition of Stephen Foster’s melancholic 1854 song “Hard Times Come Again No More,” popular among Civil War soldiers.

“All of my films are about love,” said Burns. “It’s the most complicated four-letter word there is.”

Photo by Ron Niebrugge / Alamy Stock Photo

America’s most famous documentarian visits CU Boulder.

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Sundance Kid to Hang Up His Spurs

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 22:31:07 +0000

Sundance Kid to Hang Up His Spurs Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/07/2018 - 16:31

Cinema legend and CU alum Robert Redford (A&S ex’58; HonDocHum’87) will retire from acting after the completion of his latest film The Old Man & the Gun, he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, which was published Monday.

The 81-year-old actor, who attended CU for one year in the 1950s on a baseball scholarship, earned worldwide and enduring fame though his roles in Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the President’s Men and many other films.

"Never say never, but I pretty well concluded that this would be it for me in terms of acting, and (I’ll) move toward retirement after this 'cause I've been doing it since I was 21," Redford said in the magazine interview.

Redford, who began acting professionally in the 1960s, was nominated three times for Academy Awards in acting categories. He won the 1981 best director award for Ordinary People.

In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Redford the nation’s highest civilian honor, a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In addition to his work as an actor, producer and director, Redford is the founder of the Sundance Institute, which produces the Sundance Film Festival.

While at CU, the future film legend worked as a janitor at The Sink, where you’ll find his likeness on the wall. His lasting commitment to the environment took hold during his time in Colorado, where he developed a love for geology and the mountains, he has said.

Two of Redford’s children, David Redford (Engl’85) and Shauna Redford Schlosser (Art’85) also attended CU Boulder.

The Old Man & the Gun, the true story of a criminal who escapes prison in a kayak, debuts Sept. 28.

Image credit: / Shutterstock.com

Cinema legend and CU alum Robert Redford announces retirement from acting.

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Film Buff

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 18:15:45 +0000

Film Buff Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/19/2017 - 12:15

Lauren Price

For Michael Brody, launching a film festival in Crested Butte, Colo., has been a dream come true.

It was in June 1983 on a bus in New Zealand that a stranger helped Michael Brody (IndSt’85) find his direction.

Brody, then 22, was unsure what his future had in store. After Peter Blake, a fellow traveler, taught him the art of the 16-line sonnet while touring the South Island together, he was hooked. This left Brody, a Denver native, hungry to return to Colorado and dive into creative writing, filmmaking and philosophy at CU Boulder, where he’d already been accepted.

“Storytelling was always inherent in me, but it took this incident of someone saying ‘this is how you do it,’ to let that come out,” said Brody, who spent several years traveling before attending CU and went on to found the Crested Butte Film Festival, now approaching its seventh year.

Upon graduation, Brody worked for CU’s film studies department for several years before taking a job as a film teacher at Boulder’s New Vista High School.

It was there, in 2005, that he began producing his first film, Document, a narrative about two outcast, small-town friends who seek fame in the Los Angeles film industry. When it screened on CU’s campus in 2010, he was struck by the idea of running his own film festival.

But it was a serendipitous moment during the search for a new place to live that set it all in motion.

After 20 years in Boulder, Brody was ready for a change of scenery. While scoping out Crested Butte, population 1,500 or so, as a prospective place to live with soon-to-be wife Jennifer, they learned that the little town’s short film festival, Reel Fest, had been discontinued five years ago. The couple saw their opportunity and seized it. Within 11 months (just two after their wedding) they were running the first Crested Butte Film Festival, which opened in September 2011.

After working careers in filmmaking and education, it felt right to channel their creativity in a way that could give back to a community that was now missing its film scene, Brody said.

Before moving to Crested Butte full-time in 2012, they traveled back and forth from Boulder. Community members offered their homes as lodging, eager to see a film festival return to their town.

“It almost brings tears to my eyes,” Brody said. “They loved what we were doing and just truly did this out of the goodness of their hearts.”

By now the festival — Sept. 28-Oct. 1 this year — is a Crested Butte tradition. Brody works as the film programmer and travels to other festivals around the country to select films. Topics range from the Syrian refugee crisis (Cries from Syria, which will be shown this year) to environmental degradation in China (How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change) to narrative-style films like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

There are more than 25 film festivals in Colorado every year. Brody said his festival’s films and the impact they have on the community help make it unique and important.

“I love the films that rock you to your core, that challenge the way we live,” Brody said, referencing one of his favorites, Bag It, a 2010 film about the wastefulness of plastic bags.

This year, CBFF began a partnership with Amazon Studios, the film division of Amazon.com, and will be showing new episodes from two of its biggest shows, Transparent and I Love Dick.

Always held in late September to coincide with the changing leaves of the Aspen trees, the four-day festival closes out the summer season in Crested Butte. With about 4,000 tickets sold per year, it brings an estimated 750-1,000 additional visitors to town, Brody said. Available ticket prices range from $15 per film to $240 for a four-day pass.

The CBFF also holds monthly film screenings on the third Thursday of every month year-round.

In addition to running the festival with Jennifer, who serves as the festival’s executive director, Brody continues to write screenplays. In the last few years he’s helped adapt a few novels into screenplays, most recently Created Equal, about a Catholic nun’s desire to become a priest and why the church believes she can’t. That film, starring Lou Diamond Phillips, was released earlier this year.

“I truly believe I have one of the best jobs in the world,” he said.

Lauren Price (MJour’17) is editorial assistant of the Coloradan.

Photo courtesy Arthur E. Michalak/Provocateur (top)

For Michael Brody, launching a film festival in Crested Butte, Colo., has been a dream come true.

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Filmmaker Melinda MacInnis

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

Filmmaker Melinda MacInnis Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2015 - 08:00

Jillian Arja

Saving the Rhinos

It was from a jeep on a 2008 game drive in Swaziland that Melinda MacInnis (MCreatWrit’97) saw her first wild rhinoceroses, a mother and calf.

“I got to really look into the eye of this mother,” says MacInnis, then a vacationing English teacher from Los Angeles. “I could see how truly beautiful they are and special in the world.”

It was a defining moment that changed her life. Appalled by the number of rhinos killed by poachers for the black market value of their horns, MacInnis decided to make a documentary, initially in her spare time, largely at her own expense and without any filmmaking experience. The Price, scheduled for release early next year, took her to 12 countries and earned her National Geographic 2014 Traveler of the Year honors.

“We call our film The Price not just because of the insane value put on rhino horns and ivory and pangolin [anteater] scales, but because the price of us not fixing these global problems is just as high,” says MacInnis.

Through its Traveler of the Year awards, National Geographic Traveler “celebrates individuals who travel with passion and purpose, have an exceptional story to tell, and represent a style of travel, motivation or method that can inform and inspire us all.”

“Melinda’s work to raise awareness of the existential threat to rhinos is tragically timely,” says George Stone, a National Geographic editor at large. “What she discovered changed her life, and her documentary has the potential to change how tons of other people think about conservation issues in general.”

Rhino horns are valued at $65,000 a kilogram on the black market, according to MacInnis. Largely due to poachers, the rhino population has shrunk to an estimated 25,000 from about 500,000 a century ago.

“I was so moved finding out that this really iconic creature was being slaughtered for such a tiny part of its body,” she says.

Poachers typically kill rhinos before taking their horns, but not always.

“It is unspeakable suffering as it bleeds to death without the front of its face,” says MacInnis. “It isn’t just unjust, it is unbelievably inhumane that this is happening.”

So she took action, recruiting cinematographer and fellow animal advocate John Mans (Film’89) and four other CU alumni as crew.

“The infrastructure and willingness to protect wildlife in Swaziland is strong, and hopefully with Melinda’s movie, it will be one of the rare stories that comes out of Africa with a happy ending,” says Mans. “I’m proud to have shed some light on their difficult task of saving Swazi wildlife.”

MacInnis hopes both to call attention to the rhino’s plight and to offer suggestions for how people can influence the way humans treat other animals.

“The rhino is a gatekeeper,” she says. “If we let the rhino disappear, what else are we going to let go? But if we come together internationally to save the rhino, then it’s a template for saving everything else.”

Photography by Angie Wilson

It was from a jeep on a 2008 game drive in Swaziland that Melinda MacInnis (MCreatWrit’97) saw her first wild rhinoceroses, a mother and calf.

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Roger and Me

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Roger and Me Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 06/01/2013 - 00:00

Paul Danish

Roger Ebert receiving his honorary Doctorate in Humanities in 1994.

I didn’t realize what a truly special guy Roger Ebert (HonDocHum’93) was until the first time I saw him type. His copy didn’t contain any typos.

Well, hardly any. Nobody’s perfect writing on a manual typewriter. But Roger came close.

It was August 1963, and we were at a college editors conference. Roger was editor of the Daily Illini. I was editor of the Colorado Daily.

Several of us were writing a charter and bylaws for the U.S. Student Press Association, which had been founded the year before. Roger was its first president.

And, being overly verbal and opinionated little dickens, we were driving ourselves nuts. At one point I was literally banging my head on the wall. (Roger would gleefully remind me of that whenever we met.)

Anyway, after listening to a couple hours of bickering, Roger said, “OK, I’ll type up a summary of what we’ve agreed to so far.”

We hadn’t decided anything, but everyone was too tired to argue with him and needed a bathroom break. The room emptied, and Roger sat down at a typewriter that had materialized out of somewhere and started to bang away.

In about 10 minutes he produced a polished summation of all the stuff we had agreed on without realizing it. The prose had the same easy grace and Midwest directness with which he spoke and wrote for the next 50 years.

And the first draft had barely a typo, an x-out or a revision in it.

As one who always had an adversarial relationship with manual typewriters, I found this mind-boggling.

Here was a guy who could take people’s sloppy thinking and turn it into a polished draft at 60 words a minute. I knew there was something special going on here, and it wasn’t just his flying fingers. The special part was what was going on between his ears.

In 1970 I met Roger at Stapleton International Airport (of blessed memory) and drove him to Boulder for his first Conference on World Affairs. As we started up Davidson Mesa, the snow began to fall. The next day I measured 3 feet of snow in my yard. So I can honestly say I drove Roger Ebert to his first conference through a Colorado blizzard.

How did Roger feel about the conference he would attend 37 times?

“Many felt, as I always did, that the conference was the time when you found out about what was new,” he wrote in a memorial book about sociology professor Howard Higman (Art’31, MSoc’42), the conference founder.

Of Higman, he wrote, “He was large. He contained multitudes. He would have filled Falstaff with envy,” and “he was a man who liked to be part of a good conversation.”

That pretty well describes Roger, too, but I would substitute “Dr. Johnson” for Falstaff in Roger’s case. Roger was just as smart, just as witty and just as opinionated — and a lot better tempered.

Remembering film critic Roger Ebert.

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Film

Filming the Frontlines: Jordan Campbell’s Journey Into Ukraine

International storytelling

Documenting conflict

Capturing reality

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Wakanda Forever Actress Aba Arthur

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Boulder Is the Happiest City in the U.S. … For Some

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What It’s Like To Be the Financial Guru for the Sundance Institute

Do you attend the festival each year?

Is there a film that premiered through the festival that is a particular favorite for you over the years?

What is another Sundance program you are proud of outside of the festival?

Have you met Robert Redford?

What is one of your favorite stories from your career?

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Filmmaker Melinda MacInnis

Saving the Rhinos

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Roger and Me

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