Heather Courtney
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Shooting With John: Adam Schartoff
I was very nervous about the experience. The idea was to go upstate, about 80 or 90 miles or so north up the Hudson Valley region, to some bucolic spot and shoot guns. Originally we were supposed to shoot skeet but that equipment wasn’t available so we ended up doing target practice. A longtime gun control advocate, I was a bit at the end of my rope. It was November of 2012 and there had been close to 16 mass shootings in the U.S. up to that point including the Batman shooting and the Texas A&M shooting that summer. The […]
by Adam Schartoff on Aug 29, 2013 -
HEATHER COURTNEY ON HER “WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM” SXSW PREMIERE
Documentary filmmaker Heather Courtney premiered her Where Soldiers Come From, about a group of Michigan teens who enlist in the National Guard and wind up fighting in Afghanistan, at SXSW. The film tracks their journey there and back, and it won the Best Editing award at the festival. Below, she recounts a confrontational moment that occurred between an audience member and her subjects at the premiere. A few days before the world premiere of Where Soldiers Come From at the SXSW Film Festival, we showed the final cut of the documentary to the guys and their families who are in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2011 -
SXSW SNAPS, DAY ONE
The first day at SXSW, the 4th floor. “What’s this line for?” I asked the woman standing next to me. “No idea,” she said. But it wasn’t a line for anything. The crowd was just there. And as I pushed my way through, it slowly started to dissipate. It was like one of those highway slowdowns, where the memory of congestion lingers after whatever caused it. If you’re going to sponsor a festival, at least do something useful, like this rolling Samsung display of panel times, schedule changes and social media activity. When you check into SXSW, you’re given three […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2011
