Downloads: Press Release
“Food, Inc.” a Double Winner; “Presumed Guilty” and “Good Fortune” Win Awards
New York, NY — Sept. 27, 2011 — POV (Point of View) won four awards including Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards, it was announced last night by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Food, Inc. won Best Documentary and Outstanding Informational Programming — Long Form; Presumed Guilty won in the Outstanding Investigative Journalism — Long Form category; and Good Fortune won for Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting — Long Form. The three films aired during POV’s 2010 season. PBS won a total of six 2011 News & Documentary Emmys.
“Tonight’s awards show the power of documentaries to shine a light on vital, underreported issues,” said Cynthia Lopez, POV’s Co-Executive Producer. “Food, Inc. exposed the shocking problems behind America’s food production, while Good Fortune unveiled the unintended consequences of international aid in Africa, and Presumed Guilty took up the cause of a young man falsely imprisoned in Mexico. That Antonio Zúñiga, the young man from Presumed Guilty, is now free and can be with us tonight, is a testament to the good that can come from dedicated filmmakers who fought to bring their cameras into the courtroom.”
These awards bring POV’s Emmy total to 27, including a 2007 Special News & Documentary Emmy Award
for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking. “As POV enters its 25th season on PBS in 2012, independent documentaries continue to provide in-depth, valuable public information, often seen through a personal lens,” said Simon Kilmurry, POV’s Executive Producer. “We at POV believe that public media is the place where high-quality investigative journalism takes center stage.”
POV’s News & Documentary Emmy Award-winning films:
Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner
How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? Though our food appears the same as ever — a tomato still looks like a tomato — it has been radically transformed. In the Academy Award®-nominated blockbuster Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry, revealing eye-opening facts about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we may go from here.
Food, Inc. won Best Documentary prizes from the 2009 Gotham Awards, the Environmental Media Awards, the Southeastern Film Critics Association Awards and the Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association.
Director/Producer: Robert Kenner; Producer: Elise Pearlstein; Co Producers: Richard Pearce, Eric Schlosser, Melissa Robledo; Executive Producers: Simon Kilmurry, William Pohlad, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann; Co-Executive Producer, American Documentary/POV: Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and Production, American Documentary/POV: Chris White; Series Producer, American Documentary/POV: Yance Ford; Coordinating Producer, American Documentary/POV: Andrew Catauro.
Presumed Guilty, a film by Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete; directed by Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith
Imagine being picked up off the street, told you have committed a murder you know nothing about and then finding yourself sentenced to 20 years in jail. In December 2005 this happened to Toño Zúñiga in Mexico City and, like thousands of other innocent people, he was wrongfully imprisoned. Presumed Guilty is the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Zúñiga. With no background in film, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete set about recording the injustices they were witnessing, enlisting acclaimed director Geoffrey Smith (The English Surgeon, POV 2009) to tell this dramatic story. The film is a co-presentation with Latino Public Broadcasting.
After its POV broadcast, Presumed Guilty (Presunto Culpable in Spanish) created a sensation in Mexico, where it opened in theaters in February 2011 and was banned two weeks later when a witness from Zúñiga’s trial claimed the film invaded his privacy. A judge subsequently overturned the ban, but the film had already become the highest-grossing documentary in the country’s history. Recently, it was the first documentary to be broadcast on Mexican primetime television.
Presumed Guilty‘s numerous awards include 2010’s IDA Humanitas Award; Best Bay Area Documentary,
San Francisco International Film Festival; Best Documentary, Guadalajara International Film Festival; Best Documentary and Audience Award, DocumentaMadrid; Audience Award and Best International Feature,
Los Angeles Film Festival; 2009’s Amnesty International Award, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival; and Best Documentary, Morelia International Film Festival.
Directors: Roberto Hernández, Geoffrey Smith; Producer: Layda Negrete; Executive Producers: Simon Kilmurry, Patricia Boero; Co-Executive Producer, American Documentary/POV: Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and Production, American Documentary/POV: Chris White; Series Producer, American Documentary/POV: Yance Ford; Coordinating Producer, American Documentary/POV: Andrew Catauro.
Good Fortune by Landon Van Soest
Good Fortune is a provocative exploration of how massive international efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to benefit. In Kenya’s rural countryside, Jackson’s farm is being flooded by an American investor who hopes to alleviate poverty by creating a multimillion-dollar rice farm. Across the country in Nairobi, Silva’s home and business in Africa’s largest shantytown are being demolished as part of a U.N. slum-upgrading project. The gripping stories of two Kenyans battling to save their homes from large-scale development present a unique opportunity see foreign aid through eyes of the people it is intended to help.
Good Fortune previously won the Witness Award at the 2009 AFI/Discovery Silverdocs Film Festival.
Director: Landon Van Soest; Producer: Jeremy Levine; Executive Producers: Simon Kilmurry, Diana Barrett, Katy Chevigny, Judith Helfand, Andrew Herwitz; Co-Executive Producer, American Documentary/POV: Cynthia Lopez; Director of Programming and Production, American Documentary/POV: Chris White; Series Producer, American Documentary/POV: Yance Ford; Coordinating Producer, American Documentary/POV: Andrew Catauro.
Now in its 24th season on PBS, POV airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on PBS from June to September, and features primetime specials during the year. POV has garnered many other awards, including 13 George Foster Peabody Awards, 10 duPont-Columbia Broadcast Journalism Awards, three Academy Awards®, the Prix Italia, the Webby, the IDA Award for Best Continuing Series and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers’ 2011 Award for Corporate Commitment to Diversity.
Visit POV’s website, www.pbs.org/pov/pressroom, for press releases, art, embeddable trailers, interviews, updates, lesson plans, discussion guides, and more.
The full list of winners of the 32nd Annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards is available on the National Television Academy’s website: www.emmyonline.tv
About POV
Produced by American Documentary, Inc. and now in its 24th season on PBS, the award-winning POV is the longest-running showcase on American television to feature the work of today’s best independent documentary filmmakers. POV has brought more than 300 acclaimed documentaries to millions nationwide and has a Webby Award-winning online series, POV’s Borders. Since 1988, POV has pioneered the art of presentation and outreach using independent nonfiction media to build new communities in conversation about today’s most pressing social issues. Visit www.pbs.org/pov.
Major funding for POV is provided by PBS, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Educational Foundation of America, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, FACT and public television viewers. Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Funding for POV’s Diverse Voices Project is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Project VoiceScape is a partnership of Adobe Youth Voices, PBS and POV. POV is presented by a consortium of public television stations, including WGBH Boston and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG.
Contacts:
POV Communications: 212-989-7425
Emergency contact: 646-729-4748
Cathy Fisher, cfisher@pov.org
POV online pressroom: www.pbs.org/pov/pressroom
