Lucy Walker (director)

For other people named Lucy Walker, see Lucy Walker (disambiguation).

Lucy Walker (born in London, United Kingdom) is a film director, mostly of theatrical feature documentaries. On January 25th, 2010 she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Waste Land, which she directed.

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Film career

Lucy Walker is best known for directing four feature documentary films: Devil's Playground (2002), Blindsight (2006), Waste Land (2010) and Countdown to Zero (2010).

Her two most recent movies both premiered at Sundance 2010 – the first time a documentary director has had two feature films in one year at this festival.

Waste Land premiered at Sundance 2010 and is the first film ever to win the Audience Awards at both Sundance and Berlin, as well as more than 30 other festival prizes (for the complete list see "Film awards" section below), and on January 25th, 2010 it was honored with a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards to be held on February 27th, 2011. On December 3, 2010 at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, Walker collected both the Pare Lorentz Award and also the Best Documentary Feature Award for WASTE LAND at the International Documentary Association Awards.[1] Presenter Morgan Spurlock handed Walker the award inside a garbage bag.[2] Previously Walker had worn a black garbage bag to the New York theatrical premiere of WASTE LAND on October 26, 2010.[3]

Waste Land is the uplifting story of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and a lively group of catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, who find a way from the world's largest garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro to the most prestigious auction house in London via the surprising transformation of refuse into contemporary art. It was released in the USA by Arthouse Films and in Canada by E1 Entertainment in 2010, and will be released around the world in 2011, including in the UK by E1 Entertainment.

Four years earlier, Walker's film Blindsight had been among the fifteen films competing for the Academy Award nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category at the 79th Academy Awards.[4]

Both Waste Land and Blindsight also won the Audience Award—the Panorama Publikumspreis—at the Berlinale, making Walker the only filmmaker to have won the Audience Award at Berlin twice, as well as the only filmmaker to win the Audience Awards at both Sundance and Berlin.

Blindsight premiered at Toronto and won further Audience Awards at Ghent, AFI and Palm Spring film festivals and nominations for Best Documentary at the 2007 Grierson Awards and British Independent Film Awards. It was also short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Blindsight follows the emotional journey of six blind Tibetan teenagers who climb up the north side of Mt. Everest with their hero, blind American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, and their teacher, Sabriye Tenberken, who founded Braille Without Borders, the only school for the blind in Tibet.

Devil's Playground, Walker's first feature documentary, examined the struggles of Amish teenagers during their period of experimentation (rumspringa). It premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win awards at the Karlovy Vary and Sarasota film festivals, three Emmy Award nominations for Best Documentary, Best Directing and Best Editing and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Documentary.

Countdown to Zero, an exposé of the present-day threat of nuclear terrorism and proliferation, premiered at Sundance 2010 a day after Waste Land and also played in the most prestigious Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival before being released in the US by Magnolia Pictures, and being broadcast on The History Channel . It will be released in the UK in 2011 by Dogwoof. It was Executive Produced by Global Zero (campaign) and Jeff Skoll's Participant Media and contributed to the debate building to the ratification of the New START Treaty. Walker and her collaborators were nominated for 2010 Arms Control Person(s) of the Year[5] for raising public awareness and understanding of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century and helping mobilize support for practical steps to reduce those danger.

Walker's directing credits also include Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues, for which she was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing. She was named one of the "Top 25 New Faces In Independent Film" by Filmmaker Magazine.

Film awards

Early life

Lucy Walker was born in London, United Kingdom, started directing theatre in high school and continued as an undergraduate at Oxford University. The first play she directed and produced there, Querm, swept the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society Cuppers awards. Walker was the Artistic Director of theatre group New Company and her original outdoor musical productions of The Jungle Book and Tintin and the Broken Ear were considered cult hits. After graduating from New College, Oxford with a B.A. (Hons) and M.A. (Oxon) starred first-class honours in Language and Literature she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the graduate film program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she won a contest to direct a video for Cowboy Junkies, directed three award-winning short films and received an MFA.

Early music career

While at NYU film school, Walker supported herself by DJing, and as a DJ she was featured as a cover story in Option (magazine) and on the cover of issue #154 of Wire Magazine.[6]

As a DJ she appeared frequently at the Soundlab and all over New York City as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Europe, performing mostly solo and also as a member of experimental illbient ensemble Byzar, for whom she also directed a suitably avant-garde video for the track "Phylyx" which opened MTV's AMP episodes #116, #122 and #124.

With her friend Moby, Walker contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound, Sampling Digital Music and Culture [7] edited by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid (The MIT Press, 2008).

She later used Moby's music for the soundtrack of her film Waste Land and prefers to license and mix tracks by her favorite artists to create her films' scores.

References

  1. ^ Smith, Nigel M. (December 5, 2010). "Honor Roll 2010 - “Waste Land” Director Lucy Walker". IndieWire.com
  2. ^ McNary, Dave (Decemmber 3, 2010)"IDA honors 'Waste Land'". Variety.
  3. ^ "When a trashy chick is cool". The Fallout Girl blog. October 27, 2010.
  4. ^ Hernandez, Eugene (November 15, 2006). "15 Films Selected for Oscar Short List in Doc Feature Category". IndieWire.com.
  5. ^ "Vote for the 2010 Arms Control Person(s) of the Year". armscontrol.org. 2010.
  6. ^ "The Illbient Ambience". Wire Magazine, #154. December 1996.
  7. ^ Sound Unbound, Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Paul d. Miller (ed.). MIT Press, 2008.

External links