The Producers

Hellen Rose - Producer/Music Director

Hellen Rose has worked as a performance artist/singer/writer/actor for nearly
30 years. She was the Principal Actor and Assistant Director of Lindzee Smyth’s Nightshift Theatre Asylum in Sydney 1995-1997, and a co-founder of the artists run studio and venue known as The Gunnery in Woolloomooloo Bay. She is also co-founder of The Yellow House Jalalabad (2012) with artist/film Maker George Gittoes. Rose is Assistant Director/Actor/Musician on ‘Love City Jalalabad’ and Music Director on the award winning and AFI finalist 2016, ‘Snow Monkey’, both films directed by her partner George Gittoes. She has been accepted by Screen Australia and CREATE NSW. In progress is ‘Ukrainistan - An Artists War’, a 2022 filmed under Russia-occupied Ukraine 2022.

George Gittoes - Director

George Gittoes is one of Australia’s most internationally famous filmmakers also one of Australia’s greatest artists. An auteur Director who has been making his award winning and unique films since 1977, ‘Rainbow Way’ that was shown in both the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals and only recently shown in an internationally touring show of Australian Abstract Films. 1981 ‘Refined Fire’, 16mm short film, Sydney Film Festival. 2003-04 ‘Soundtrack to War’, Iraq, feature documentary, VH1 and ABC. Various scenes included in Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ 2005-06 ‘Rampage’, feature documentary, shot in Miami, shown at Berlin Film Festival (nominated for a Golden Hugo Best Documentary). Theatrical release in UK and Australia. 2009 Feature documentary, ‘Miscreants of Taliwood’, completed, Pakistan, screened by SBS, IDFA, and at Telluride. 2013 Completed feature documentary, ‘Love City Jalalabad’, produced by Piraya Films, Stavanger, Norway. Selected for Sydney Film Festival (Nominated for the Foxtel Australian Documentary Award) 2013.

Making The Film

Director George Gittoes behind the scenes of White Light



Director's Statement

When we made the decision to film White Light in Southside Chicago the important issues around Black Lives Matter were being shelved or put in the ‘too hard basket’. Until the murder of George Floyd black lives were only getting worse for our friends in segregated red line zones like Southside Chicago.Their dire situation was off the radar of the wider population and the media . I am proud that our film can now serve its purpose of helping to educate in a world where white silence is being seen as complicity.

Back in 2003 when I was at Uday’s Palace in Baghdad, making Soundtrack to War , Elliot Lovett, who was the most talented of the soldier rappers, told me that Miami, where he came from, was more dangerous than Iraq. I followed Eliot back to Miami and found this to be horribly true when his brother Marcus was shot and killed. With rising gun violence in the US and 2018 being the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King I decided it was time to use my experience, both in war zones and Miami, to go to the place in Southside Chicago they have renamed Chi-Raq due to more deaths in this one neighbourhood than US soldiers in Iraq.

I arrived with no contacts. I decided against taking the advice that I would have to have an armed bodyguard and live outside the Englewood area renting an apartment at ‘Southside ground zero’ .
The ‘White Light’ title and my plan for the film came from a visit back to Miami to catch up with the Lovett family 12 years on. Denzell, the youngest brother had been shot and technically died until resuscitated by paramedics. When his heart stopped he saw the ‘white light’ and wrote a rap song about it which he managed to remember from the other side of life.

Once in Chicago I sought out victims of gun violence who had experienced the ‘white light’ after being shot. One of my first interviews was with Solja who was paralysed from the waist down and had lost a leg after being shot in the back . Solja told me how his gang had a guardian angel, “a model girl called Kaylyn who had won the Mario Make Me a Model competition.” I realized that if I could bring Kaylyn, the innocent victim, back to life through the memories of those who knew and loved her I would have the perfect vehicle in my film to make the strongest case against gun violence. Kaylyn became the connecting link to all the characters I needed from the May Block gang to such activists as Rev Michael Pfleger of St Sabina Church and his successful closing down of the Dan Ryan Expressway, which gave the film its hopeful climax.

I approach documentary as an artform and while I use many of the methods of a journalist my main aim is to create immersive portraits of places and their communities. The challenge of my films is to develop multiple characters rather than a few while get audiences to love them all.

I shoot and direct. I have been a photographer as well as a painter since I was 15 years old and see the camera as a brush linked to my eye, my method is to have two to three cameras, hand held on all situations. I depend on my second cameraman, in this case Waqar Alam who has worked with me for 12 years and on 3 previous films, to work telepathically in sync with my camera and body language.

In all my documentaries I attempt to push the boundaries of the medium in a similar way to their continual expanding in the visual arts. I do this while always remaining aware of the need to tell clear and accessible stories.

I was inspired to come to the US in 1968 (at the age of 18) by the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King. Sadly, that is the year he was assassinated and now 50 years on nothing has changed with the lives of people of colour getting worse with more poverty, segregation and violence. I now count America as one of the many war zones I have taken my art to.

- George Gittoes, Director, White Light