HAMPTONS DOC FEST HONORS MATTHEW HEINEMAN
WITH THE 2023 PENNEBAKER CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
GALA EVENING HONORING MATTHEW HEINEMAN
SATURDAY, DEC 2, BAY STREET THEATER
6:30PM Cocktail/Buffet Reception
8:00PM Pennebaker Award and Interview by former Pennebaker Awardee Liz Garbus with Matthew Heineman
Followed by screening of American Symphony
Tackling difficult and often hard-to- access subjects while addressing great social truths.
It’s impossible to not be charmed by documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman. Despite his many cinematic accomplishments at a young age (he’s now only 40), the Academy Award-nominated and nine- time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker remains unaffected by what he has pulled off–getting access to many subjects that were often off-limits to outsiders while traveling to hot spots throughout the world.
He didn’t start out with a desire to be a gutsy filmmaker. His fascination with American history led him to seek a career as a teacher, but after being rejected by Teach for America, he went on a road trip with his three best friends after graduating from Dartmouth College. As he shot roll after roll of the young people he met during their journey–150 hours of film over three months–he fell in love with the process of filmmaking. Eventually the finished film (Our Time) was sent to HBO and, while they didn’t accept it, they ended up hiring him for the Alzheimer’s Project, where he helped produce one of several films on the subject.
Throughout his illustrious career, Heineman takes on large amorphous subjects and tries to understand them, humanize them, and attempt to make the world care about the topics he picks to explore. He doesn’t select easy or safe subjects; consider that he’s made films about the war in Afghanistan (Retrograde), the drug war in Mexico (Cartel Land), Isis in Syria (City of Ghosts), COVID (The First Wave), and the problems with healthcare (Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare), to name a few. Heineman says, you can “speak great social truths through the power of the documentary film.”
Cartel Land, about the Mexican Drug War, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2016. He won the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary award from the Director’s Guild of America for the often-brutal film and also the 2015 Courage Under Fire Award by the International Documentary Association.
City of Ghosts came out two years later and took a hard-hitting look at the atrocities in Syria. The Guardian gave the film five stars and called it “the definitive contemporary documentary about the tragedy of Syria.” Moreover, Heineman won the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary award from the Director’s Guild of America again, becoming one of only three people to win the prestigious honor twice.
Heineman’s films often take time, both to get access and then to make them. When he starts a new film, Heineman doesn’t know exactly where the story will take him. Retrograde tells the story of the war in Afghanistan, but when he started this project, he didn’t know he’d end up being in Afghanistan as
the U.S. military pulled out. When he was 21, a mentor told him: If you end up with the story you started with, then you weren’t listening along the way. That lesson has stayed with him, and he always goes where the story takes him.
The fact that he has often been in hazardous war zones for his films doesn’t mean he’s a thrill seeker. He says he doesn’t get off on being in dangerous situations and was often scared during the filming of Retrograde. “It was scary getting in a Black Hawk helicopter when you knew there was a chance of getting shot at by a rocket from the Taliban,” he admits. To calm his nerves, he would focus on his camera. “If I’m risking my life,” he added, “I sure as hell better cover it well.”