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DAVID CARR AWARD FOR TRUTH IN FILMMAKING - Montclair Film Festival | BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY - El Paso Film Festival | OFFICIAL SELECTION - Tribeca Film Festival
Journalism • Diversity and Inclusion • Women and Gender • LGBTQ+ • Inequality and Equity in the Newsroom • Reproductive Rights • Abortion
Date of Completion: 2023 | Run Time: 99 minutes | Language: English with English subtitles | Captions: Yes | Includes: Transcript | Directors: Heather Courtney, Princess A. Hairston & Chelsea Hernandez | Producers: Diane Quon, Heather Courtney, Princess A. Hairston & Chelsea Hernandez | Editors: Jamie Boyle & Kristina Motwani
Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora wanted to do something radical about the white men dominating newsrooms. “70% of policy and politics editors are men, almost all of them are white,” says Emily. “These are the people deciding which stories are told, who is telling them, and whether they will be on the front page or the back page, if they get there at all.” So, Emily and Amanda along with Editor-at-Large Errin Haines and a scrappy group of fearless women and non-binary journalists band together to buck the status quo and launch The 19th*, a digital news start-up. Named after the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote, but with an asterisk to acknowledge the Black women and women of color who were omitted, the 19th’s work is guided everyday by the asterisk - asking who is being omitted from the story, and how can they be included. Errin Haines covers politics and race, including the first national story on the killing of Breonna Taylor. Emerging Latina reporter Chabeli Carrazana is based in Florida and reports on gender and the economy. LA-based Kate Sosin, a nonbinary reporter, covers LGBTQ+ stories, including the large number of anti-trans bills becoming law in states around the country. The film documents the honest discussions at The 19th* around race and gender equity and inclusion, revealing that change doesn’t come easy, and showcasing how one newsroom confronts these challenges both as a workplace and in their journalism. But this film is about more than a newsroom. It’s about America in flux, and the voices that are often left out of the American story.
AWARDS
DAVID CARR AWARD FOR TRUTH IN FILMMAKING | Montclair Film Festival
BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY | El Paso Film Festival
FILM FESTIVALS
Tribeca Film Festival
Director & Producer of THE UNAFRAID and BREAKING THE NEWS
Heather Courtney is a Guggenheim fellow and an Emmy® winning filmmaker. She won an Emmy®, an Independent Spirit Award, and a SXSW Jury Award with her film Where Soldiers Come From. Heather was also a fellow at the Sundance Edit and Story Lab. She has directed and produced several other documentary films including award-winners Letters from the Other Side and Los Trabajadores/The Workers, which both focused on immigration issues, and were broadcast nationally on PBS. She has received awards and funding from ITVS, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, the Austin Film Society, the Fulbright Fellowship and the International Documentary Association.
Director of BUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM and BREAKING THE NEWS
Chelsea Hernandez is a Mexican-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. She directed and produced BUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM. Named as one of Texas Monthly’s “10 Filmmakers on the Rise,” she is an 8-time Lone Star Emmy winning director, producer and editor. Chelsea has worked for ten years in the documentary television and film industry on such projects like PBS national broadcast special, Fixing the Future, hosted by David Brancaccio of NPR’s Marketplace and directed by Ellen Spiro (Body of War, Troop 1500) and national 6-part series Ancient Roads from Christ to Constantine directed by Hector Galan (Children of Giant, Chicano), United Tacos of America an 8 episode series on El Rey Network and most recently on That Animal Rescue Show a 10 episode series for CBS All Access. From 2013 to 2016 Chelsea was editor and co-producer of Arts In Context, a documentary series produced at KLRU-TV, Austin PBS and distributed by NETA, broadcast in 80% of the PBS markets nationwide. Beyond television work, Chelsea has directed and produced various documentary films including the 2018 SXSW Texas Short Jury Winner An Uncertain Future, a commissioned project with Field of Vision and Firelight Media. She made her feature directorial debut in 2019 with Building the American Dream which premiered at SXSW and recently had its national broadcast premiere on PBS.
Director, Producer & Cinematographer for BREAKING THE NEWS
Princess A. Hairston--is a director and Emmy-nominated editor in New York City. Princess has produced and directed films such as BREAKING THE NEWS a feature-length documentary that is currently distributed on PBS. Princess also produced and edited LADIES FIRST: a story of Women in Hip Hop on Netflix. She is an editor for several films such as the Visions Audience Award Winning documentary Songs from the Hole which premiered at SXSW 2024, This World Is Not My Own which premiered at SXSW 2023, the highly ranked Amazon doc series LulaRich, Pier Kids, and FRESH DRESSED, an official 2015 Sundance Film Festival selection and the Emmy-nominated series Capture with Mark Seliger. In 2020, she produced a digital campaign for “GET OUT THE VOTE” for Black Lives Matter. Princess was selected as one of 25 filmmaker nominees for the 2020 Lynn Shelton Of A Certain Age grant. She is a 2018 recipient of the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship and a 2018 Winner of the NYTVF + WEtv Producer Pitch which led to a development deal. Her work has been recognized with nominations and awards from the Emmys, The Webbys, and many film festivals.
Writer & Editor for BREAKING THE NEWS
Jamie Boyle is a two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her work has played at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and many others. Her feature directorial debut, ANONYMOUS SISTER opened to critical acclaim in theaters nationwide in 2023, was shortlisted for the 2023 IDA Best Documentary Award, and is a 2024 Emmy Award-nominee for Best Social Issue Documentary.
Most recently, she wrote and edited BREAKING THE NEWS which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on PBS’s Independent Lens. She edited TRANS IN AMERICA: TEXAS STRONG, winner of the 2019 News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Short Documentary. TEXAS STRONG was the first of a three-part docu-series she edited that premiered at SXSW in 2019 and launched on them. (TeenVogue and Conde Nast’s LGBTQ+ platform). She was the editor, producer, and cinematographer for JACKSON (Showtime), winner of the 2018 News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. Jackson premiered at the LA Film Festival and was awarded Best Documentary at over fifteen festivals. She was the Associate Editor and Production Manager on E-TEAM (Netflix), which won the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Cinematography Award and was nominated for two News and Documentary Emmys, including Best Documentary. She directed, filmed, and edited TAKE A VOTE, a short documentary spotlighting the fight against voter suppression that premiered at DOC NYC in 2020. She was the lead video editor for the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.
She has been a guest lecturer at Brown University, Columbia University, NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse), and others. She served as a judge for the 2017 News and Documentary Emmy Awards and was selected for the 2019 DOC NYC 40 Under 40 list.