Fresh Blood On The Indie Circuit: Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

Titles: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Stats: Filmmakers of the Oscar nominated documentary Jesus Camp. Owners of Loki Films, a New York based documentary film production company founded in 2001.


Heidi Ewing - has produced and directed documentaries for The Discovery Channel, Britain's Channel 4, the BBC, A&E Network and Arte. Previously, Heidi produced and co-directed a one-hour film for the Discovery Channel on the ancient origins of tribal and religious body modification, a documentary shot on location in Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. She has also produced a three-part -series on the criminal justice system in the Bronx, focusing on juveniles in the System (Discovery Channel). Her most recent directorial success was "Dissident: Oswaldo Paya and the Varela Project," a film about the struggle of Havana-based dissident and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Oswaldo Paya. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and has showed to critical and industry praise. She is the co-founder of Loki Films.


A private investigator turned filmmaker, Rachel Grady - has produced and directed a wide variety of documentaries for The Discovery Channel, the A & E Network and Britain's Channel 4. Previously, she focused on the erratic and complex New York criminal justice system for a special A&E series, "New York Justice." For that series, Rachel chronicled the lives of five overworked public defenders and also completed "Mad Justice," a verité documentary that looks at the troubling fate of mentally ill defendants and parolees. Rachel recently completed "TX," a first ever look at life inside drug rehabilitation. This eight part series (for VH1) follows ten young adults as they battle to get off alcohol, heroin, crack and pills. Rachel is the co-founder of Loki Films.

Fresh Blood On The Indie Circuit: Julia Loktev

Title: Julia Loktev

Stats: Born in 1969, St. Petersburg, Russia. Attended NYU and did her thesis on Moment Of Impact. Works and currently lives in New York City. Currently nominated for an Indpendent Spirit Award for Best First Feature.

“The subway, a public space with no specific place. Buried beneath the urban grid, the subway is neither here nor there. It is the city in motion, the city becoming, the city on the run -- a constantly shifting no man's land, in a perpetual state of carrying the periphery towards the center and the center out towards the periphery. For 15-30 minutes at a time, passengers of completely different races, cultural backgrounds, economic classes and sexual orientations stand and sit next to each other, physically touching people they will never meet. In the city, public space becomes a transition rather than a destination. You don't go to a public space, you go through a public space..."

An excerpt from the mind of Julia Loktev, as well as the minds of all New Yorkers about the subway experience. Lotkev directed, written and produced Day Night Day Night. The film is nominated for Best First Feature from this rookie filmmaker and is the talk of everyone in the NY indie film community.

The film is about a 19 year old girl who prepares to become a suicide bomber in Times Square. She speaks with no accent, so that it is impossible to mark her ethnic background. It is never understood why she chooses to become a suicide bomber, she has already made before the story begins. It is not understood who she represents or what God she believes in. The film is inspired in part by a story in a Russian newspaper and playing off a history of Joan of Arc films.

Lotkev's film won at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and in 1998 she directed a documentary called Moment Of Impact that gave her the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Moment of Impact was documentary dealing with Lotkev's own family tragedy resulting in a car accident on April Fool's Day.

Fresh Blood On The Indie Circuit: Jeffrey Blitz

Title: Jeffrey Blitz

Stats: Won the Directing Award: Dramatic for Rocket Science at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Graduated from USC. Maxed out 15 credit cards to make his first documentary.

There is not much information out there about this guy, which makes him someone to look out for. In 1999 he followed a group of eight teens on their quest to win the regional spelling bee and prepare themselves for the national contest in Washington D.C. Even though he maxed out 15 credit cards to make the film, it was bittersweet because the documentary was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 and won several awards at countless film festivals.

Blitz made a comeback again with his film Rocket Science. He wrote and directed the film. It's about a boy with a stuttering problem and finds himself falling in love with the star of the debate team. He becomes a part of her world of ultra competitive high-school debating with its players, politics, and own set of rules.

Blitz has also directed an episode of the hit TV show The Office.

Fresh Blood On The Indie Circuit: Ryan Fleck

Title: Ryan Fleck

Stats: Attended NYU. Also attended Columbia Film School. Best Director Nominee for Half Nelson.

Listed in Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Indie Film Ryan Fleck has had quite a successful, yet underrated career as a filmmaker. He's one of those guys that has been all around the festival circuit, but you really didn't know who was until now. That is because his film Half Nelson has an Academy Award nomination thanks to the film's star Ryan Gosling with his ground-breaking perfromance.

Ryan Fleck wrote along with his girlfriend, Anna Boden the screenplay to Half Nelson. The film is about a drug addicted teacher in Brooklyn who teaches inner city pre-teens. Although he manages to keep his addiction concealed in the classroom, one day a student catches him getting high after school. From this unexpected turn of events, the teacher and student begin an unanticipated friendship.

Half Nelson was selected for Sundance's 2004 Writer's Lab. The script is based on a short film he directed called Gowanus, Brooklyn. About an African-American girl who falls for her White teacher who is also addicted to drugs. The film Gowanus, took home the Grand Jury Prize for short filmmaking at Sundance in 2004.