B is for Bomb, No Child, We Were Humans

SUBJECT: PEACE AND SAFETY IN THE WORLD

B is for the Bomb
USA, 2004, 10 min
director: Carey Schonegevel

Winner of the Cannes 2006 online competition, is a short history of the nuclear age as told by a child. Nuclear war is the deadliest video game ever. It's not game over yet.
Carey Schonegevel grew up in South Africa and has lived and studied in the U.K. and New York. Her NYU thesis film, Heartspace, received the Carl Lerner award and has screened at numerous film festivals including Cinequest, Clermont-Ferrand, GenArt, UFVA's "Next Frame" (winning the Director's Choice Award), Rochester, Northampton, Austin, Cork, and Montreal, as well as in Africa at FESPACO and the Johannesburg Biennale. As a screenwriter, Schonegevel has cowritten Hotel Kisangani, a travel story about being where you are, The Devil Knows You're Dead, a dark comedy about the pursuit of happiness, and a tale of corporate espionage called Cash. She recently returned to South Africa where she has launched Hothouse, a Transatlantic feature film production partnership which will develop African stories for the big screen.

No Child
USA, 2006, 8:19 min
director: Gabe Cheifetz

More About No Child from Director Gabe Cheifetz:
No Child was a difficult piece to make. We had been commissioned by Current TV to make a short documentary that looked at President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, and we had to do several different versions before we finally got it right. At first we tried to do something funny with it, but that didn't work very well. We had a variety of interviews with policy makers and educators, and they were good interviews, but somehow the topic really didn't lend itself to funny interviews. So we ended up throwing all of that away, basically our entire production and concept, and we went in a different direction: military recruitment in high schools, and its relationship to No Child Left Behind.
We shot exactly one interview with counter-recruitment activists, one with an Army recruiter, and one with an Army Reserves recruiter on a hidden camera that Chris had set up in his apartment. So the recruitment interviews you see in No Child are the only ones we shot. We tried really hard to edit this material in a way that accurately represented what happened. I think that for the most part we succeeded.
Some people have interpreted No Child as a simple slam on military recruiters. It's not. We wanted to talk to recruiters, counter-recruitment activists, and show what they had to say about No Child Left Behind. The counter-recruitment activists made a big deal about how dishonest the recruiters were, and so we decided to tape a recruiter with a hidden camera and see what happened. What we found was that the recruiter on the hidden camera used some hard-sell tactics. Was it dishonest? It was hard to say. But what she said didn't seem to match what the other recruiter had said. And so we showed that.
After No Child aired on Current TV, the regular Army recruiter we had interviewed got in touch with us. He was extremely offended by the piece, and felt that it was highly dishonest and that it was an attack on his profession. This was disturbing for me to hear, because I thought that he had argued his case persuasively, and generally came across well in the interview. He told me that people harass him, call him a baby-killer, and that recruiters are under immense pressure to hit recruitment goals.
This is the big flaw in No Child. Talking to the recruiter, I realized that there is another side to the story, which is the pressure you're under as a recruiter to make the numbers. This is a key piece, and No Child should have showed it. It would have made it harder for audiences to watch No Child but would have been more of a complete story.
Gabriel Cheifetz, 30, is a freelance producer of documentary film and television. Working with Phillips Community TV in Minneapolis and Current TV in San Francisco, Gabriel has produced a number of short-form documentaries.

We Were Humans
Italy, 2002, 1 min
producer: Allysson Lucca

Allysson Lucca's Italian production company, LuccaCo, specializes in creating Web sites/movies for humanitarian and social organizations and individuals who share these goals. They produce websites and accompanying interactive media, including interactive CD-ROMs and multimedia content. By using innovative media methods, they create messages with the hopes of reaching as many viewers as possible around the world.