The News & Documentary Emmy Awards were presented on Monday, October 1, 2018, in a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City, an event attended by more than 1,000 television and news media industry executives, news and documentary producers and journalists. Independent Lens was pleased to learn that …
Keith Maitland’s animated documentary TOWER has left critics and awards-voting bodies alike flummoxed as to how best to categorize it. This is a visionary work, no doubt, that uses voice-actors and vintage audio to reconstruct what happened back in 1966 when a sniper shot dozens of people on the campus of University of Texas. The rotoscopic …
Pure and simple, 1966 was considered by many critics as one of the greatest years for popular music ever [see the Guardian’s “Was 1966 pop music greatest’s year?” and the LA Times‘ “1966 Could be Rock’s Most Revolutionary Year“]. The AV Club’s Steven Hyden on why 1966 was his favorite year for music: “I chose …
Keith Maitland‘s previous film The Eyes of Me, the moving story of a group of blind teenagers making their way in Austin, aired on Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy for Graphic Design and Art Direction. For TOWER, Maitland tells another Austin story, but one that goes back in time to 1966, for what is …
Craig Staggs is the lead animator for the little animation studio that could, Minnow Mountain, based in Austin, Texas, also the home base of filmmaker Keith Maitland. Staggs’ company did the brilliantly layered animation for Maitland’s film TOWER. Of that film which tells the story of the heroes and victims who were on the University of …
Austin was an extremely appropriate place to premiere the film Tower, which revisits the 1966 sniper shootings at the University of Texas at Austin, considered the first mass shooting on a college campus in the United States. Many of the survivors and heroes from that devastating day fifty years ago were on hand to witness the …
