The Producers
Jeremy Williams: Director
Jeremy Williams is a BAFTA Award-winning director who has worked in television for twenty years and made more than 40 documentary films as a producer and director. He is currently a lecturer in Film and Television practice at the University of Falmouth in the UK in their Department of Film and Television. Jeremy has been a long‐time collaborator with October Films, producing a number of television documentaries and two feature-length docs: London and Ghosts of the 7th Cavalry , the latter nominated for a One World Media Award for Best Documentary in 2008. Recently he produced and directed Restless Flights , which profiled Nobel Literature Prize winner JMG Le Clezio, and Orphans of Burma’s Cyclone , for Channel 4 in the UK which was shown in WNET’s Wide Angle series as Eyes of the Storm.
Eli Cane: Producer
Eli Cane runs Normal Life Pictures, a New York-based production company. He was producer and music supervisor for The Market Maker, which aired nationally on PBS as a Wide Angle in 2009 and was selected for the Good Pitch at Silverdocs. He also produced a feature-length documentary for the Why Poverty? series entitled Land Rush, about agricultural land grabs in Mali and the future of food sovereignty. The film was featured at the Good Pitch London in 2011 and at IDFA in 2012, and has been screened in both the UK Parliament and the US Capital Building. In addition, the film became a center-piece of Oxfam’s “Behind the Brands” campaign, and aired in dozens of cities around the US in honor of World Food Day in 2013. The film was instrumental in achieving the campaign’s primary goal of convincing PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé, and Illovo to adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards land grabs.
Making The Film
Filming began in April 2010 and continued until December 2016. Production trips were conducted in an episodic way and generally lasted from a few days to several weeks, with a small crew, usually from one to three people.
Animations were created simultaneously and during post-production. Nebraska-based artist Michael Burton worked with Guy, creating the painted stop-motion animations in his Lincoln, NE studio.
The film is a coproduction of ITVS, Vision Maker Media, and Normal Life Pictures, Inc. It received additional funding from Tribeca Film Institute, Humanities Nebraska, and the South Dakota Humanities Council.