Downloads: Press Release
Navajo Teen Athletes Race Toward the Future in POV’s ‘Up Heartbreak Hill,’
Premiering Thursday, July 26, 2012 on PBS
Teen Angst Typically Includes Conflict Between Past and Future — But What If the Past Is the Reservation and the Future a World Apart?
A Co-production of ITVS and Native American Public Telecommunications, Inc. (NAPT); A Co-presentation with NAPT. Program Is Part of American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen
Up Heartbreak Hill has its national broadcast premiere on Thursday, July 26, 2012, at 10 p.m., during the 25th anniversary season of the award-winning PBS series POV (Point of View). POV continues on Thursdays at 10 p.m. through Oct. 25 and concludes the season with fall and winter specials. (Check local listings.) American television’s longest-running independent documentary series, POV is the winner of a Special Emmy for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking, two International Documentary Association Awards for Continuing Series and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers Corporate Commitment to Diversity Award.
At 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, sprawling across parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Its population is approximately 300,000. The land is beautiful and harsh, with few resources to support economic development or the preservation of traditional Navajo culture, and with little economic incentive for ambitious young people to stay. As Thomas ruefully admits, “Around here, everyone thinks they live in a third-world country.” In fact, his hometown of Navajo, N.M., has a per-capita income of about $6,100 a year according to the 2010 U.S. Census, and only 30% of kids graduate from high school. The juxtaposition of the land’s arid beauty and the impoverished communities seen in Up Heartbreak Hill runs like an unsettling tone poem through the film. Thomas’ ambition is “to go to college, come back here and make a difference for my nation.”
The Navajo people, who once shunned the educational system of their conquerors, which imposed suppression of the Navajo language, have embraced education as their best hope of survival. They dream of sending their children off to higher education and seeing them return to become leaders in their tribal communities. Yet the reluctance of Native parents to see their children actually go–and possibly not return–and the attachment of the kids to a place and way of life that is profoundly their own, creates emotional conflicts. Even a distance of 600 miles, which is how far Thomas will be from the reservation if he attends Eastern New Mexico University, is enough to create a crisis of abandonment between Thomas and his father, Jazz. Similarly, Tamara wants to go on scholarship to four-year Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. But as much as her parents support her ambitions, they cannot bear the idea of her going so far away and urge her to attend a two-year community college that is closer by.
Add to these tensions some of the problems — broken families, substance abuse, teen pregnancy — that Thomas and Tamara see around them, and these teens carry burdens far weightier than those of most 18-year-olds. As standouts at Navajo Pine High School and steeped in a deep Navajo tradition of running, they become the objects of family and community hopes while they carry on a typical adolescent struggle to understand themselves.
Thomas has a rebellious streak, signaled by his brightly colored Mohawk haircut, which makes him easy to spot as he circles the track. He is also involved in a racially tinged conflict with one of his white teachers that almost gets him tossed off the cross-country team days before a pivotal race. Dedicated and driven, he likes to test himself against “Heartbreak Hill,” the infamous ascending pass on the local cross-country course, and hopes to win a state title and a college scholarship. Yet Thomas cannot quite free himself from the mesh of a broken family, which includes his reformed but troubled alcoholic father, an absent mother and the aunt who took him in when his grandmother died in a car accident.
Tamara, too, is a runner and she is also senior class president and a top contender for valedictorian, completing an impressive course load that includes the Navajo language and advanced placement calculus. She is upbeat, charismatic and popular among her fellow students. Her family is happy and stable, and her parents supportive of her ambitions to pursue an engineering degree. Yet even she expresses deep ambivalence about seeking education off the reservation and, given her career prospects, of moving away for good.
What Thomas calls his love of “the mountains, the trees and the thought of being free” as he makes practice runs through the ochre, rock-faced landscape of the reservation speaks eloquently to the spiritual attachment these Native American youths have to their land and to the traditional Navajo way of life. Up Heartbreak Hill is a poignant account of how these two teenagers manage a dramatic coming of age under the long shadow of a troubled history.
“My suburban New York high school had not a single Native American kid in a student body of 2,000, and the only reference to modern-day Native society I can recall pertained to casinos,” says director Erica Scharf. “Almost everything I learned was presented within the context of ‘long ago.’ Up Heartbreak Hill was born of the realization that as Americans, we are largely unaware not only of cultures abroad but, perhaps even more alarmingly, of communities within our own borders. I hope this film will help forge a greater understanding of a rarely glimpsed American community — a nation within a nation — whose current history, tribulations and triumphs are widely ignored.
“Thomas and Tamara’s decisions are dominated by the push-pull of a place whose very earth they have been connected to for hundreds of years but whose socio-economic realities make attaining even basic standards so challenging. They are not always victims and they are not always heroes, although they have had to deal with more adversity in their 18 years than many others have. In essence, they are teenagers — and their story is, in many ways, a universal one. They struggle to find their families, to leave their families, to navigate the choppy waters of the high school social scene and to chart a path for the future.”
Up Heartbreak Hill is a co-production of Long Distance Films, NAPT, ITVS, POV’s Diverse Voices Project and New Mexico PBS, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
About the Filmmaker:
Erica Scharf (Director, Producer, Cinematographer)
Erica Scharf has spent much of her career in documentary film and television. She is currently a producer for HGTV’s popular series House Hunters International. She has also worked as an editor on the documentary program The Shift (Investigation Discovery). In 2008, she spent six months on location in Dallas, shooting and producing A&E’s documentary television series The First 48. She has also edited several episodes of The First 48.
Scharf began her career as an associate producer for Worlds Apart (NGC), a vérité travel and culture program. She directed and edited Marnee: A Garage Sale Retrospective, which won first place at Movie Making Madness 2005, and edited City, which won Best Short Film at the 2007 Aspen Shortsfest. Other credits include Dual Survival (Discovery), Celebrity Ghost Stories (Biography) and SWAT (A&E). In 2005, she was the assistant editor on God Grew Tired of Us, which won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for Documentary at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she received a bachelor of fine arts degree in film and television.
Credits:
Director/Producer: Erica Scharf
Producer: Christina D. King
Executive Producer: Chris Eyre
Co-producer: Sara Alize Cross
Cinematographer: Erica Scharf
Editors: Cindy Lee, Isaac Wayton, Megan Brennan, Janine Feczko
Original Music: Sasha Gordon
Running Time: 56:46
POV Series Credits:
Executive Producer: Simon Kilmurry
Co-Executive Producer: Cynthia López
VP, Production & Programming: Chris White
Series Producer: Yance Ford
Coordinating Producer: Andrew Catauro
Awards and Festivals:
- Official Selection, Cleveland International Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Arizona International Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Atlanta Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2012
- Official Selection, Los Angeles Skins Fest/A Native American Film Festival, 2011
- Official Selection, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, 2011
- Official Selection, American Indian Film Festival, 2011
- Official Selection, VisionMaker Film Festival, 2011
Native American Public Telecommunications, Inc. (NAPT), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) which receives major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, shares Native stories with the world through support of the creation, promotion and distribution of Native media. Founded in 1977, NAPT brings awareness of Indian and Alaska Native issues. NAPT operates VisionMaker, your premier source for quality Native American educational and home videos. All aspects of our programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media — to be the next generation of storytellers. For more information, visit www.nativetelecom.org.
American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen is a public media initiative to help communities nationwide identify and implement solutions to the high school dropout crisis. Made possible by CPB, the campaign is designed to raise awareness and dialogue through national and local multiplatform programming. Targeting communities with the highest dropout rates, the initiative increases local engagement and action through partnerships and encourages student engagement through classroom curricula and professional development for teachers. Public radio and television stations — locally owned and operated — reach 99% of the country over the air, have built models for successful intervention in early learning and have deep connections in the communities they serve. Among the 600+ partnerships formed through American Graduate, CPB is partnering with America’s Promise Alliance and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Visit American Graduate on Facebook, Twitter or AmericanGraduate.org.
Produced by American Documentary, Inc. and celebrating its 25th season on PBS in 2012, 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 325 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, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the desJardins/Blachman Fund and public television viewers. Funding for POV’s Diverse Voices Project is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. POV is presented by a consortium of public television stations, including KQED San Francisco, WGBH Boston and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG.
POV Digital (www.pbs.org/pov)
POV’s award-winning website extends the life of our films online with interactive features, interviews, updates, video and educational content, as well as listings for television broadcasts, community screenings and films available online. The POV Blog is a gathering place for documentary fans and filmmakers to discuss films and get the latest news.
POV Community Engagement and Education (www.pbs.org/pov/outreach)
POV’s Community Engagement and Education team works with educators, community organizations and PBS stations to present more than 600 free screenings every year. In addition, we distribute free discussion guides and standards-aligned lesson plans for each of our films. With our community partners, we inspire dialogue around the most important social issues of our time.
American Documentary, Inc. (www.amdoc.org)
American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia company dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. AmDoc is a catalyst for public culture, developing collaborative strategic engagement activities around socially relevant content on television, online and in community settings. These activities are designed to trigger action, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and community participation.
Contacts:
POV Communications: 212-989-7425. Emergency contact: 646-729-4748
Cathy Fisher, cfisher@pov.org
Cynthia López, clopez@pov.org
POV online pressroom: www.pbs.org/pov/pressroom
