J-School alums and lecturers discuss filmmaking and journalism at San Francisco forum

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is an incubator for talented documentary filmmakers in recent years, and some of the school’s most celebrated alumni and lecturers gathered this week to discuss the craft of filmmaking. Alums Peter Nicks (class of ’99), Dan Krauss (’04), and Carrie Lozano (’05) were joined by J-School lecturer James Wheaton and Freedom of the Press Foundation founder Trevor Timm. Andres Cediel (’04) moderated the panel discussion.

Throughout the evening, the filmmakers showed short clips of each of their films, including Nicks’ feature The Waiting Room, which depicts a day in the life of an Oakland hospital; Krauss’ The Kill Team, an examination of war crimes committed by a U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; and Death on the Bakken Shale, Lozano’s recent Al Jazeera documentary about worker safety in North Dakota’s oil fields.

The group discussed some of the ethical considerations they’ve encountered in their own work, and they explored the increasingly murky distinction between journalism and art. Wheaton, the president of the Environmental Law Foundation and founder of the First Amendment Project, offered some perspective on the legal challenges that documentary filmmakers face today.

Cediel is a producer and lecturer at Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. He has produced several films for PBS Frontline, including Rape in the Fields. He is currently working on a follow-up to that film. Lozano works as an executive producer of documentaries for Al Jazeera America. Previously, she worked as a senior producer for Fault Lines, and she is a veteran of Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. Krauss is an Emmy- and Academy Award-nominated independent filmmaker who has produced The Death of Kevin Carter and The Kill Team, two of the most important nonfiction films produced in recent years. Nicks has enjoyed wide acclaim for his 2012 film, The Waiting Room, and he is currently working on a film about the Oakland Police Department.