Lucy Walker (director)

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

Lucy Walker is an English film director. She is best known for directing the following five feature documentary films: Devil's Playground (2002), Blindsight (2006), Waste Land (2010), Countdown to Zero (2010), and The Crash Reel (2013). She has also directed some notable short films, such as The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (2011), The Lion's Mouth Opens (2014), and fifteen episodes of Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues, for which she was nominated for two Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Directing.[1]

Walker and her films have been nominated for two Academy Awards, seven Emmys, a DGA Award, a Gotham Award, and an Independent Spirit Award. She has also won around one hundred other film awards, including an Emmy, two Cinema Eye Honors, two IDA Awards, two awards at Sundance, two at Berlin, and one at SXSW (full list below) .

Walker has been shortlisted five times and nominated twice for an Academy Award. On 25 January 2011, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature for Waste Land. On 24 January 2012, she received her second nomination, this time in the Best Documentary Short category for The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. Blindsight and The Crash Reel were also shortlisted (and ultimately not nominated) for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and The Lion's Mouth Opens is currently shortlisted for Best Documentary Short.[2][3]

She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,[4] The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the International Documentary Association, and the Directors Guild of America.

Early life

Walker was born in London, and she started directing theater in high school. She continued as a student at Oxford University, where she directed and produced an original musical called Querm. The movie won the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society Cuppers Award. Walker went on to become the artistic director of the theater group New Company, and her outdoor musical productions of The Jungle Book and Tintin and the Broken Ear were cult hits. After graduating from New College, Oxford with a B.A. (Hons) and a M.A. (Oxon). She was later awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the graduate film program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She directed award-winning short fictional films and received an MFA.

Music

Walker also had a career as a DJ and a musician. While at NYU film school, Walker supported herself by DJing and was featured as a cover story in Option and on the cover of issue No. 154 of The Wire.[5] She appeared frequently at the Soundlab, New York City, USA, and Europe, while performing solo and also as a member of experimental illbient ensemble Byzar. She also directed a suitably avant-garde video for the track "Phylyx", which was broadcast most prominently as the show-opening video on MTV's iconic 1990s electronica show AMP (episodes 116, 122, and 124).[6]

Writing about music, 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). Her extensive use of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85–92 to form the soundtrack to Devil's Playground' was written about in detail in Marc Weidenbaum's book about this seminal album.[8]

Film career

Lucy's most recent film, The Lion's Mouth Opens, is a verité documentary about confronting life’s most daunting moments with purpose and grace, and about the impact of genetic bonds and genetic testing on the people we love and on how we face our destiny. Stunningly courageous young filmmaker-actor, Marianna Palka, gathers her friends around her as she finds out whether she has inherited Huntington’s Disease, an incurable degenerative disorder which took her father and now has a 50% chance of taking her body and her mind. Intimate, suspenseful, and emotional, with sensitive verité cinematography by Nick Higgins, and with a title taken from Bob Dylan's poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which Marianna recites in the film (Woody Guthrie had died from Huntington’s Disease), The Lion’s Mouth Opens ultimately inspires. It premiered at Sundance on 26 January 2014 and awards include the Best Nonfiction Short of 2015 at the Cinema Eye Honors. HBO acquired the film for broadcast during Huntington's Disease Awareness Week in May 2015, and after its initial festival run it was expanded from sixteen to twenty-eight minutes.

Lucy was inspired to make "The Crash Reel" when she met Kevin Pearce (snowboarder) while mentoring at a retreat organized by David Mayer de Rothschild. "The Crash Reel" premiered at Sundance on 19 January 2013 as the Opening Night Gala film (out of competition).Honors she received included an Emmy win and nominations for Best Documentary at the Director's Guild Awards and Gotham Awards. Chronicling the epic rivalry between Kevin and Shaun White which culminates in Kevin's life-changing crash and a comeback story with a difference, the film also showcases the remarkable Pearce family, including Kevin's father renowned glass-blower Simon Pearce and Kevin's brother David C. Pearce, who is eloquent about his struggle to accept his Down Syndrome. The film was the first movie to ever play at the X Games, and Walker created the "#loveyourbrain" organization and campaign around Traumatic Brain Injury prevention, awareness, and support, for which Outside (magazine) featured Lucy in a cover story declaring "Lucy Walker Will Change Winter Sports".[9]

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom is described as "a visual haiku for Japan" documenting the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and the survivors' struggle to survive. It is a personal, poetic film about the ephemeral nature of life and the process of healing after grief and loss. The film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2011 and went on to screen at festivals including Sundance in 2012. There, it was awarded the Short Film Jury Prize: Non-Fiction and the Women In Film National Geographic All Roads Award on the day that its Academy Award nomination was announced. It was also honored with two Emmy nominations.

Waste Land premiered at Sundance 2010 and is the first film ever to win Audience Awards at both Sundance and Berlin, as well as more than fifty other awards and a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. At the International Documentary Association Awards, presenter Morgan Spurlock memorably handed Walker the Best Documentary Feature Award wrapped inside a garbage bag,[10][11] continuing the joke that Walker had worn a black garbage bag to the New York theatrical premiere.[12] 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 transformation of recyclable materials into contemporary art. It was released theatrically in the USA by Arthouse Films, in Canada, in the UK by E1 Entertainment, and in Australia/NZ by Hopscotch Films.

Blindsight premiered at Toronto and won awards including nominations for Best Documentary at the 2007 Grierson Awards and British Independent Film Awards and short-listing 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. Both Waste Land and Blindsight won the Audience Award at Berlin Film Festival, making Walker the only filmmaker to have won that award twice.

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 including 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 proliferation, also premiered at Sundance 2010, the first time a director has had two feature documentaries in one year at this festival. It also played in the Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival before being released in the US by Magnolia Pictures, in the UK by Dogwoof, and in Japan by Paramount, and its contribution to the debate building to the ratification of the New START Treaty earned Walker a nomination for Arms Control Person of the Year[13] 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 that danger.

For television Walker's directing credits include over a dozen episodes of Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues, her first job after film school, for which she was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing. Her content and commercial work includes directing "Project Daniel" for Intel, which was awarded an AICP Curator's Award and three Bronze Lions at the Cannes Festival of Creativity[14]

She was named one of the "Top 25 New Faces In Independent Film" by Filmmaker and called "the new Errol Morris" by The Hollywood Reporter. Variety has profiled her as a notable "Femme Filmmaker", praising her ability to connect with audiences.[15]

There have been two retrospectives of Walker's films, one at the DC Environmental Film Festival, and one at London's British Film Institute Southbank, both in 2012.

Controversy

Lucy's is viewed as a controversial figure within the national filming industry, as well as internationally. She has been criticized domestically for her opinions about men and alleged disregard for human rights. Internationally, she is criticized for her hostility towards some countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, Israel and other Western and Arab nations.

Select Filmography

Film awards and nominations

Lifetime Achievement Awards
The Lion's Mouth Opens
David Hockney IN THE NOW (in six minutes)
The Crash Reel
Intel Look Inside - Project Daniel
Make Haste Slowly (documentary short)
Secrets of the Mongolian Archers (documentary short)
Waste Land
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (documentary short)
Countdown to Zero
Blindsight
Devil's Playground
Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues

References

External links

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