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Eighth Annual Festival

9:23 min
Documentary
Director: Lynn True & Nelson Walker
Producer: Nelson Walker, Co-Produced by Tsering Perlo & Keefe Murren

Winner of the Sustaining Traditions Award
Sponsored by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Foundation

FILMMAKER BIOS

Lynn True, Director & Producer

Lynn True is a New York-based filmmaker and editor. After graduating from Brown University with a joint degree in Urban Studies and Architecture, Lynn was an assistant editor of documentary programming for NBC News Productions, PBS and AMC. She later moved on to make independent film projects and her work has screened nationally on PBS, Sundance Channel and Current TV, as well as at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at film festivals and conferences around the world. Lynn traveled to Tibet for the first time in 2006 when she was a documentarian for the Kham Geotourism Project — a collaborative initiative between the Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library and the Maysles Institute. With Nelson Walker, she recently co-founded the Kham Film Project, an organization that uses documentary film to contribute to the diversity and quality of Tibetan cultural representation. Lynn was also Co-Producer and Editor of the documentary about Michigan asparagus farmers and their struggle with globalization, Asparagus! (Stalking the American Life), which began as the of Media that Matters FOCUS: Good Food participant film, Asparagus! (A Stalk-umentary).

Nelson Walker, Director & Producer

Nelson Walker III holds a BA in American Civilization from Brown University and began his film career penning documentaries for Discovery Channel, History Channel and PBS’s NOVA. His directorial debut — iThemba/Hope, a documentary about an HIV+ choir from South Africa - won the Health Advocacy Award in the fourth annual Media That Matters Film Festival in 2004 and aired on the Sundance Channel in 2005. Nelson has worked extensively in Tibet as a visiting instructor at Tibet University in Lhasa and contributor to the Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library. Nelson and Lynn’s last film, Lumo, a documentary feature about a young woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo recovering at a hospital for rape survivors, won the President’s Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a Student Academy Award and was broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. series. The film began as the short In Transit, won the Global Health Award in the sixth annual Media That Matters Film Festival. Nelson will complete his MFA in film directing from Columbia University this fall and is currently a Program Director for the Maysles Institute.

Tsering Perlo, Producer

Perlo is the founder and executive director of Rabsal, an association of young Tibetans dedicated to the regeneration and revitalization of Tibetan culture. Originally from a nomadic family in Zachukha, in the Kham region of Eastern Tibet, Perlo has spent years working with grassroots communities throughout Kham. He is a graduate of the Sichuan Province Tibetan School (SPTI) and has worked with a variety of international development organizations including the Tibet Fund, The Bridge Fund, and the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library at the University of Virginia. In 2008, Perlo launched a teaching program in participatory-video making at SPTI. He is the first recipient of the Machik Fellowship, a program designed to support dynamic Tibetan change-makers working to strengthen their communities and environments.

Keefe Murren, Producer

Keefe Murren is currently a producer at Sundance Channel, a cable television station under the creative direction of Robert Redford. His first film iThemba|Hope (Directed and Produced with Nelson Walker and Lynn True) was a portrait of one remarkable member of the HIV+ Sinikithemba Choir based in Durban, South Africa. Keefe recently completed a feature-length documentary, August in the Empire State, a film exploring the political division in the US through the eyes of two political activists from opposite sides of the Red State, Blue State divide. Keefe is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Film Studies and Anthropology, and a Fulbright Scholar.