Join us for a screening of The Grab (Magnolia Pictures, Participant) followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Nathan Halverson (producer and main character), David Ritsher (journalist), JoeBill Muñoz ’19 (associate producer) and Mallory Newman ’19 (associate producer).

A Q&A following the screening will be moderated by Bernice Yeung, managing director and managing editor of UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program.

Nate Halverson, Mallory Newman and Emma Schwartz in THE GRAB, a Magnolia Pictures & Participant release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Synopsis

Quietly and seemingly out of sight, governments, private investors and mercenaries are working to seize food and water resources at the expense of entire populations. These groups are establishing themselves as the new OPEC, where the future world powers will be those who control not oil, but food.

And it’s all beginning to bubble to the surface in real time. Global food prices have hit an all-time high, threatening chaos and violence. Meanwhile, Russia is using food as a weapon against the Ukrainians, and as a geopolitical tool to wield global power.

THE GRAB is a global thriller combining hard-hitting journalism from The Center for Investigative Reporting with the compelling character-driven storytelling of director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, taking you around the globe from Arizona to Zambia, to reveal one of the world’s biggest and least known threats.

Christa Scharfenberg, manager of Berkeley Journalism’s California Local News Fellowships, was an executive producer on the film.

Other alums involved in the production:

Emma Schwartz (‘19) – Associate Producer
Yinuo Shi (‘21) – Additional Associate Producer/Archival Producer
Christian Collins (’20) – Production Assistant
Buddy Terry (‘23) – Production Assistant
Myah Overstreet (‘23) – Production Assistant
Talia Mindich (‘20) – Production Assistant

Additional cinematography by alums:

Debora Souza Silva (’14)
Zachary Stauffer (’08)

Nate Halverson

Nate Halverson is a national Emmy Award-winning senior reporter and producer at The Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. He was a producer and lead reporter for The Grab.

He has reported around the world, including Russia, Guatemala, England, Zambia, China, and Venezuela. His investigations have ranged from financial fraud and organized crime to uncovering internal company documents that resulted in a tech company paying a $155 million settlement to its users. His award-winning work has also appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fox News, CNN, Mother Jones, Newsweek, The Denver Post, MSNBC, The Press Democrat and elsewhere.

JoeBill Muñoz

JoeBill Muñoz is an award-winning Mexican-American director and producer whose work includes feature documentaries and TV series that have showcased at international film festivals and broadcast on Hulu, Showtime, PBS, and more.

As a producer, he spent two years doggedly working on The Grab.

Muñoz is the director of The Strike, a feature documentary about a protest against solitary confinement in California prisons. The Strike premiered at Hot Docs in 2024 where it won the student choice award, is currently playing at festivals across the country, and will broadcast nationally in 2025. He has directed short films for Independent Lens (Maletero, Evidence Lost) and NBC (Follow the Sun), which tell the stories of heroic people absent in popular media. He was on the team behind the Emmy-winning, Kids Caught in the Crackdown (Frontline), about President Donald Trump’s policy to separate immigrant children from their parents, and most recently has been working with Left/Right Media on series like The Circus (Showtime), The New York Times Presents (Hulu), and an upcoming collaboration with HBO and Words + Pictures.

Mallory Newman

Mallory Newman was a reporter and associate producer on The Grab. She assisted with all aspects of production and particularly focused on the Trove, the collection of confidential emails and documents which showed how Erik Prince’s Frontier Resources Group was investing in agriculture projects in Africa. From 2007 to 2014, Newman was an enlisted Marine and deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. She has a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from San Francisco State University and is an alum of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

David Ritsher

David Ritsher is the senior editor for TV and documentaries for Reveal. He has produced and edited award-winning investigative documentaries for over 15 years, on subjects ranging from loose nukes in Russia to Latino gangs in Northern California. His work has appeared on FRONTLINE, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, National Geographic, Discovery, KQED and other national broadcast outlets. Before joining CIR, David was the coordinating producer for FRONTLINE/World (based out of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program) for over six broadcast seasons and championed much of its experimentation with video on the web.

Nate Halverson and Mallory Newman in THE GRAB, a Magnolia Pictures & Participant release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.