Doc Shorts 1: Childhood Heroes
Guests Expected
Directors Carol Dysinger and Jason Hanasik are expected to attend. Additional guests include Nick Hurndon, subject of Childhood on Fire, and Katie Bryer, editor of Lost and Found.
Description
Children can be fragile, especially in troubled times. These inspiring shorts highlight men and women doing their best to help the next generation. Whether working within their own family (A Childhood on Fire), a school for girls (Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)), or the chaos of a refugee camp (Lost and Found), these everyday heroes and the kids they nurture will warm your heart.
Total runtime 76 min.
Program screens in the following order:
A Childhood on Fire
(Jason Hanasik, USA 2019, 14 min)
A father writes notes of encouragement to his sons, trying use the lessons he has learned from his own difficult childhood and painful experiences with toxic masculinity to forge a better path for his own children.
Lost and Found
(Orlando von Einsiedel, UK 2019, 22 min)
The world’s largest refugee camp is temporary home to nearly 700,000 Rohingya forced to flee persecution by the Myanmar military. There, Kamal Hossain dedicates himself to helping children who have become separated from their families.
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)
(Carol Dysinger, UK/USA 2019, 40 min)
In war-torn Afghanistan, where girls are not encouraged to pursue an education, Skatestan is a special school that works with girls from impoverished neighborhoods. Along with reading and writing, instruction in skateboarding gives them a chance to face their fears and discover their strength.
Co-Presented by
Afghan Coalition
Pop-Up Magazine
Carol Dysinger is a filmmaker, writer, artist, and educator, whose contemporary work offers a counter-narrative to traditional stories of conflict. She is in the midst of a trilogy of films on Afghanistan and America post 9/11.
Jason Hanasik is a filmmaker, artist, curator, and journalist. His work has appeared in The Guardian, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, in the Los Angeles Times, in the academic journal Critical Military Studies, at various international film festivals, on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Ace Theatre in LA, and in solo and group visual art exhibitions worldwide. He is currently a resident at SFFILM’s FilmHouse where he is developing a screenplay and editing new films for The Guardian’s Documentaries Division and the BBC.
Orlando von Einsiedel is the Oscar-winning director of the short documentary The White Helmets. His first feature documentary, the Bafta and Academy Award nominated documentary Virunga, won over 50 international film awards including an Emmy, a Peabody, a Grierson, and a DuPont-Columbia Award for outstanding journalism.