Three Second-Year Students Selected as Finalists in Pitch Competition during Tribeca Film Festival

Three UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism second-years are heading to New York as finalists in a national documentary pitch competition organized by the Pulitzer Center, The New York Times Op-Docs, and the Tribeca Film Institute. Lacy Roberts, Luisa Conlon and Hanna Miller are vying for a grant of up to $10,000 to make a film about a Syrian refugee and his father making a new life in Canada.

The trio initially teamed up in their first semester to make a short video about an injured Iraqi refugee undergoing rehabilitation after being resettled in the Bay Area. That story, which was picked up by The Atlantic, led them to another: A piece for PBS NewsHour on a rehabilitation center for wounded Syrian refugees in Jordan. Last May, the three traveled to Amman with a grant from the J-School. At the center, they met Ibrahim, a 13-year-old from the Damascus suburbs. Two years before, while his father was making a grocery store run, a bomb had struck his family’s apartment building. Ibrahim’s mother and three siblings were killed, and he was badly injured.

But when he met the reporters, he was smiling. He had an infectious positivity, they said, and wisdom beyond his years. In 30 seconds, they found, the boy explained the Syrian conflict better than any adult they’d met. He told them he wanted to be a war journalist when he grew up, because the last person who’d left the scene of the bombing that killed his family was a reporter.

“He said, ‘He let the world know what happened to the Syrian people, and that’s what I want to do,'” Conlon recalled. “We thought, ‘This kid needs to tell his story.'”

Ibrahim and his father resettled in Canada with the help of a refugee agency, and the Berkeley team has kept up with them.

All three have pursued other projects for their theses. Roberts, an audio reporter from Montana, is working on a long radio feature about the Northern Cheyenne tribe’s relationship to resource extraction in the state. Conlon, originally from New York, is making a documentary about another tribe, California’s Yurok, and its efforts to curb domestic violence. Miller is making a film about the struggles and hopes of a teenage mom in her Mississippi hometown of Collins.

But the boy they met a year ago has been on their minds.

“I kept thinking about what it would be like for this man who had raised a family with his wife to all of a sudden be a single dad in Winnipeg,” Conlon said. “It seemed incredibly difficult and incredibly lonely. I really wanted to know how they were holding up.”

Roberts said they’re hoping to answer a central question about a boy who had met hardship with resilience: “Who do you become when you’re coming of age when your country and family’s been erased?”

They weren’t the only ones intrigued by the story. The trio made the final cut from a field of applicants from 31 Pulitzer Center partner schools. They’ll pitch their doc at the Manhattan office of The New York Times before a panel of judges on April 25. Their instructors at Berkeley have high hopes.

“They’ve established a track record of urgent, relevant and ferociously ambitious work,” said lecturer Dan Krauss. “They represent the highest ideals of the J-School’s documentary program and the documentary community at large.”

Prof. Orlando Bagwell, director of the documentary program, said the trio’s effort to follow an evolving set of stories through two years of study and reporting exemplifies what the School wants for its students: Space to chase great ideas. “Our program is really set up for this kind of short-form work,” he said.

And the short documentary form has exploded, Bagwell said, in large part due to The Times’ decision to launch its Op-Docs department in 2011″Óa department, he pointed out, that was the brainchild of J-School alum Jason Spingarn-Koff.

Pitching their film and representing Berkeley in New York is a thrilling opportunity, said Roberts, Conlon and Miller. It’s also causing them some sleeplessness. This is thesis crunch time, after all.

“We’ll be working on the plane on the way there and working on the plane on the way back,” Miller laughed.

By Graelyn Brashear (’17)