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Eighth Annual Festival

9:18 min
Documentary
Director: Melissa Young & Mark Dworkin
Producer: Melissa Young & Mark Dworkin

Winner of the Labor Award
Sponsored by SEIU

FILMMAKER BIOS

For twenty-one years, Young and Dworkin have been producing award-winning independent documentaries for festivals, television, and community screenings through the non-profit company Moving Images Video Project. Recent programs on the environment, human rights and global justice include Net Loss: The Storm Over Salmon Farming [2003], Another World Is Possible [2002] about the World Social Forum, and Not For Sale / No Se Vende [2002] about the contentious global trade issue of patents on living things. The team’s 2005 feature length Argentina - Hope in Hard Times has shown in festivals in North and South America, Europe and Asia and won a CINE Golden Eagle, among other awards.

Melissa Young, Director & Producer

Melissa Young was drawn to documentary filmmaking in the late 1980’s, when she realized what an effect hearing directly from people in war-torn Central America could have on people in North America. One of the first programs she worked on, Vamos a Hacer un País, dealt with a construction brigade that built a school in Nicaragua. She then took several filmmaking workshops at 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle. Since then she and Mark have produced many programs on social and environmental topics, with her most recent documentary broadcast nationwide on PBS stations titledHow Can I Keep on Singing? - gritty stories of settler and indigenous women in the West a hundred years ago. Melissa and Mark have also collaborated with grassroots organizations like Jobs with Justice to create media to advance particular campaigns. Young has a background in Latin American studies and many of the programs she has produced were either filmed all or partly in Latin America. She works with the Seattle non-profit production company, Moving Images.

Mark Dworkin, Director & Producer

As an early pioneer with portable video equipment, Mark Dworkin earned a PhD in Communications from the University of Washington, where he taught video production. Since his first trip to Central America with Melissa in the late 1980s, Mark has concentrated on producing independent documentaries. He co-produced two early PBS documentaries with Melissa: In the Midst of Winter, which follows people with AIDS facing early death and Retooling America, which follows peace-time conversations surrounding defense production at the end of the Cold War. Since completing Argentina-Turning Around, Melissa and Mark have been editing Good Food & Where It Comes From [working title] which shows vivid examples of small farmers contributing to a more sustainable food and farming system in Northwest America.