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Teddy Roosevelt and Fracking (October 2017)

An experimentary documental essay, Teddy Roosevelt and Fracking explores the beauty and fragility of the North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana landscapes, contrasting the vastness and stark loneliness of the relatively untouched wild areas with the terrible beauty of the oil derricks, fracking towers, natural gas burn offs, coal mines, machinery, trucks, energy installations, and energy towns -- visual evidence of the recent boom and bust economy that echoes the cattle boom and bust of the 1880's. Teddy’s writings about the landscape and conservation combine with our images, and all this is accompanied by a kind of musical score composed and layered from natural and found sounds, e.g., a song of mourning for the death of Teddy's young wife using mourning doves, meadowlarks, wind, and water; or a song of terrible beauty for the modern day fracking footage, using heavy equipment, machinery creaking in the heat, clanking security gates, and methane flame burn off.

  • Pamela Falkenberg
    Director
  • Jack Cochran
    Director
  • Pamela Falkenberg
    Producer
  • Jack Cochran
    Editing
  • Pamela Falkenberg
    Cinematography
  • Jack Cochran
    Sound design
  • Pamela Falkenberg
    Production design
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental
  • Runtime:
    29 minutes 59 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 19, 2017
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    2K and 4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • WV FILMmakers Festival
    Sutton, WV
    United States
    October 7, 2017
    Work-in-progress, out of competition screening
  • Queens World Film Festival
    Queens, NY
    United States
    March 18, 2018
    World Premiere
    Winner, Best Documentary Short; nominated for Best Documentary Short, Best Director Documentary Short, and Best Cinematography Documentary Short
  • Ekofilm Festival
    Nowogard
    Poland
    May 18, 2018
    European Premiere
    Official Selection
  • Buffalo International Film Festival
    Buffalo, NY
    United States
    October 7, 2018
    New England Premiere
    Official Selection
  • American Presidents Film and Literary Festival at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum
    Fremont, OH
    United States
    October 5, 2018
    Midwest Premiere
    Winner, Audience Choice Award, nominated for Best Short Film and Best Production
  • Go West Film Festival
    Greeley, CO
    United States
    November 4, 2018
    West of the Mississippi Premiere
    Audience Favorite Award
  • Pleasure Dome
    Toronto, ON
    Canada
    2019 season
    Selected, but not yet scheduled
  • Front Range Film Festival
    Longmont, CO
    United States
    February 23, 2019
    Official Selection
  • World Film Festival
    Tartu
    Estonia
    March 18, 2019
    Baltic premiere
    Official Selection
  • Ozark Foothills FilmFest
    Locust Grove, AR
    United States
    April 26, 2019
    US Southeast premiere
    Official Selections and Winner, Best Documentary Short
  • West Side Mountains Doc Fest
    Athens
    Greece
    August 19, 2019
    Greek premiere
    Official Selection
  • Near Nazareth Film Festival
    Afula
    Israel
    December 2, 2019
    Finalist, best silent film
Director Biography - Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran

Pam's bio:

Pam is an independent filmmaker who received her PhD from the University of Iowa and taught at Northern Illinois University, St.Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame. She directed the largest student film society in the US while she was at the University of Iowa, and also ran films series for the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, IN. Her experimental film with Dan Curry, "Open Territory," received an individual filmmaker grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Center for New Television and the Indiana Arts Council. "OT" was screened at numerous film festivals, including the AFI Video Festival, and was nominated for a regional Emmy. Her other films include museum installations, scholarly/academic hybrid works shown at film conferences, and a documentary commissioned by the Peace Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Pam wants to make all kinds of films with Jack, but she is particularly proud of having suggested that his poems should be made into films, and collaborating on bringing them to life.

Jack's bio:

Jack is an independent filmmaker who has produced, directed, or shot a variety of experimental and personal projects. As a DP he has extensive experience shooting commercials, independent features, and documentaries. His varied commercial client list includes BMW, Ford, Nissan, Fujifilm, Iomega, Corum Watches, and Forte Hotels. His features and documentaries have shown at the Sundance, Raindance, Teluride, Tribeca, Edinburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Taos film Festivals, winning several honors. His commercials and documentaries have won Silver Lions from Cannes, a BAFTA (British Academy Award), Peabody Awards, and Cable Aces. Jack was trained at the University of Iowa Creative Writers Workshop as well as the University of Iowa film studies program. Some notable credits: Director of Photography on Brian Griffin's "Claustrofoamia,"Cinematography for Antony Thomas’ "Tank Man," Director/Cinematographer of "Viento Nocturno", and Cinematographer of Ramin Niami’s feature film "Paris."

Jack has been writing poetry all his life, but never knew what to do with his poems, until he showed his notebooks to Pam, who said, “You’re a filmmaker — why shouldn’t they be films?”

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg are making personal films together again under the name Outlier Moving Pictures. They hope their new films will be worthy of the name -- avoiding the usual patterns and approaching their subject matter from the margins (which sounds better than saying that as filmmakers they're oddballs and cranks). Pam and Jack met in graduate school and made films together when they were young. Jack went on to become a professional cinematographer working out of LA and London, while Pam stayed in the Midwest, where she was a college professor and independent filmmaker before dropping out to work in visual display. Their first film together, "The Cost of Living," based on some of Jack's short poems, screened at several film festivals, including the Queens World Film Festival, the Buffalo International Film Festival and the Cornwall Film Festival, was nominated for two awards at the 2017 Jim Thorpe Film Festival, and took the award for best experimental film at the 2016 WV FILMmakers Festival. Other short poetry films have screened at the Ò Bhéal Poetry Film Festival (2016, 2018), the Juteback Poetry Film Festival (2017, 2018), the Festival Silencio (2017) , the Filmpoem Festival (2017), the 6th CYCLOP Videopoetry Festival (2017), the 6th International Video Poetry Festival (Athens Greece, 2018), and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival (2018). Just completed is an experimental documentary essay about the North Dakota landscape and Teddy Roosevelt, "Teddy Roosevelt and Fracking," which showed out-of-competition as a work-in-progress at the WV FILMmakers Fest in October 2017 and premiered at the Queens World Film Festival in March 2018, where it was nominated for three awards (Best Cinematography, Best Director, and Best Documentary Short), taking the award for Best Documentary Short. "Teddy" has also screened at the 2018 Ekofilm Festival in Poland, the 2018 Buffalo International Film Festival, the 2018 Go West Film Festival, and the American Presidents Film and Literary Festival at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Museum and Library in October 2018, where it was nominated for two judges awards and won the Audience Choice Award. Along with that, a series of shorts about photo opportunities and roadside attractions in Texas (the first installment of which, "Prada Marfa," premiered in the True Texas Travel category at the Thin Line Festival in April 2018), and some brief experimental romantic comedies based on Craigslist's Missed Connections, a compilation version of which, "Missed Connections Anthology," premiered at the Austin Spotlight Festival in April 2018, and screened for the second time at the KinoDrome Festival in Cleveland, OH in September 2018. Their most recent poetry films are collaborations, with Dave Bonta, on "In West Virginia," from his book, "Failed State," and with Lucy English on, "The Shadow," and "The Names of Trees," for her Book of Hours project (http://thebookofhours.org/).