Heather Courtney – “Where Soldiers Come From”
Date: Thursday, March 1, 2012 – 2:30 – 7:00pm
Join us for a Master Class with filmmaker Heather Courtney at 2:30 pm followed by a screening of the documentary “Where Soldiers Come From” and Q&A starting at 5:30 pm.
WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM is an intimate look at the young men who fight our wars and the families and town they come from. Returning to her hometown, director Heather Courtney gains extraordinary access, following these young men as they grow and change from reckless teenagers, to soldiers looking for bombs in Afghanistan, to 23-year-old veterans facing the struggles of returning home. The documentary looks beyond the guns and policies of an ongoing war to examine the war’s effect on the future of these young men, their parents and loved ones, and the whole community when young people go off to fight.
Heather Courtney has directed and produced several documentary films including Letters from the Other Side and
Los Trabajadores. With her current film, Where Soldiers Come From, she was a Sundance Edit and Story Lab fellow, and a 2009 recipient of the United States Artists fellowship. Her films have been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, ITVS, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Texas Filmmakers Production Fund. She was recently named one of Film Independent’s Top 10 Filmmakers to Watch. Letters from the Other Side was the Closing Night film at the Slamdance Film Festival in January 2006, screened at numerous festivals around the world, and was broadcast on over 60 PBS stations. Los Trabajadores won the Audience Award at SXSW and the International Documentary Association David Wolper award, and was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. She was a co-director on Roger Weisberg’s Critical Condition, which aired nationally on POV in Fall 2008, and is a member of the acclaimed film distribution cooperative New Day Films. Prior to receiving her MFA in Film Production, she spent eight years writing and photographing for the United Nations and several refugee and immigrant rights organizations, including in the Rwandan refugee camps after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Excerpted from the Center for Social Media site.