VOCES: The Pushouts | LATINO PUBLIC BROADCASTING

Voces Season 5

VOCES: The Pushouts

Directors/Producers: Katie Galloway, Dawn Valadez and Sharon Tiller

Genre: Documentary

Program Length: 1 Episode/60 minutes

Broadcast Date: December 20, 2019 on PBS

WATCH PREVIEW

ABOUT THE FILM-

I was in prison before I was even born. So begins the story of Victor Rios, a high school dropout, Oakland gang member, and three-time felon by age 15. But when a teacher’s quiet persistence, a mentor’s moral conviction, and his best friend’s murder converge, Rios’s path takes an unlikely turn. 20 years later Rios, by then an award-winning professor, author and expert on the school to prison pipeline, rejoins his old mentor to work with young people who have been pushed out of school for reasons beyond their control.

Filmed over more than 25 years, THE PUSHOUTS weaves Rios’s inspiring dropout-to-professor narrative with stories of YO! Watts, a youth center serving 16-24 year-olds who are out of school and out of work. A then-and-now story of unusual intimacy and depth, THE PUSHOUTS trades narratives of tragedy and victimization for true stories of grit and resilience, highlighting the vast potential of young people to thrive when given access to meaningful opportunities and connections to adults who care.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS+

Katie Galloway

Director/Producer/Writer

KATIE GALLOWAY, Director, Producer, Writer, founder and principal of BIG PICTURES, is a documentary filmmaker, investigative reporter & impact producer whose work explores the intersections of institutional power, civil & human rights and political activism. Her feature documentary THE RETURN (POV, 2016), the third in her trilogy on the 21st century American justice system, follows the release of thousands of “lifers” after a historic reform as a lens through which to consider downsizing mass incarceration. BETTER THIS WORLD (POV, 2011) follows the case of young friends from Texas charged with domestic terrorism after falling under the sway of an older activist/undercover FBI informant. PRISON TOWN, USA (POV, 2007) looks at the impact of the prison boom on rural America through Susanville, a town with more prisoners than free people.

Galloway’s other work includes the feature documentary EL POETA (VOCES, 2015) which follows a spontaneous uprising against Mexico’s violent drug war (and its US roots) sparked by the murder of a poet’s son; a trio of films on the justice system for PBS FRONTLINE (SNITCH, THE CASE FOR INNOCENCE and REQUIEM FOR FRANK LEE SMITH) and a body of shorts that have screened to live audiences around the world and been distributed by a range of media partners including the New York Times Op-Docs series, Field of Vision, Mother Jones, USA Today, This Week Tonight with Jon Oliver, The Marshall Project’s Viewfinder series and others.

Her work has been shown at NY MoMA’s Director’s Fortnight, at Lincoln Center, on Capitol Hill, inside prisons nationwide and with top festivals and broadcasters internationally. She has received the Writer’s Guild of America’s Best Documentary Screenplay Award, Gotham Independent Film’s Best Documentary Award, an IDA Creative Achievement Award, The Imagen Awards’ Best Documentary prize, a Peabody and five National Emmy Nominations, as well as Best Doc awards from San Francisco International, Tribeca, Human Rights and other respected festivals.

A recent Sundance Institute and Fledgling Fund Fellow, Galloway’s earlier fellowships and residencies have been with HBO/Film Independent (Producing); Sundance/Women-In-Film’s Women’s Initiative (Directing & Producing) and at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, where she was the filmmaker in residence. She has taught documentary filmmaking, history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she hold’s a Master’s, and in Media Studies at UC Berkeley, where she holds a Ph.D. in Politics. An Oakland native, Galloway lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Dawn Valadez

Co-Director/Producer

DAWN VALADEZ, Producer/Co-Director, is a filmmaker, social worker, artist, youth development specialist, resource wrangler and impact strategist. Her award-winning feature documentary GOING ON 13 premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It follows the stories of four girls of color as they transform from 9 year old little girls into 13 year old teen-women, examining via an intimate, verite-driven approach the experience of young women growing up in America.

In addition to spearheading THE PUSHOUTS impact campaign, Valadez is in production on her feature documentary TEACHER LIKE ME, which she is directing and producing. The film tells the stories of five leaders of color striving to become teachers in a system that once failed them. Once wrapped, TEACHER LIKE ME will complete Valadez’s trilogy on race, class, education and coming of age in the 21st Century U.S.

Valadez’s work is supported by the Ford Foundation/Just Films, Sundance Documentary Fund, Tribeca All Access, The California Humanities Council, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, CPB, Latino Public Broadcasting, The San Francisco Foundation, Fledgling Fund, the Logan Foundation and others. Her work has been awarded numerous awards and honors, including most recently the Saul Zaentz Artist Award (2017), a Chicago Media Project Impact Prize (2018) and the Imagen Awards’ Best Documentary Award (2018). Vice President of the board of the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Valadez advises on documentary films and public engagement campaigns and acts as a review panelist for a range of public documentary and other media funders.

Past residencies and fellows programs have included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Producer’s Academy, The Sundance Lab / Skoll Foundation’s STORIES OF CHANGE Initiative; the BAVC Media Makers Fellowship; NALIP’s Latino Producer’s Academy and Media Market and the Women of Color Filmmakers’ Artist Residency Center. She lives and works in Oakland, California.

Sharon Tiller

Executive Producer

SHARON TILLER, Senior Producer/Executive Producer, is the executive producer for special projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her most recent documentary project for CIR is To Kill a Sparrow, a film about young women in Afghanistan jailed for moral crimes. The film received top honors at the International Film Awards Berlin and the Taos Shortz Film Festival.

From 1995-2011, Tiller was senior producer for special projects at FRONTLINE, including a four-part series Drug Wars about America’s thirty year, $30 billion campaign to combat drug trafficking. The series was honored with a George Foster Peabody Award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award and a national Emmy.For nine seasons from 2001-2010, Tiller was also the executive-in-charge of FRONTLINE/World, the groundbreaking PBS international news magazine that featured the work of a new generation of video journalists. The series was honored with the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award.

From 1989-1994, Tiller was the executive director and executive producer of CIR, where she co-produced investigative documentaries for FRONTLINE, including Global Dumping Ground with Bill Moyers, which wonaWorld Affairs Council Award of Excellence for International Reporting; The Great American Bailout, which won a George Polk Award for National Television Reporting; Best Campaign Money Can Buy, which won a national Emmy; and School Colors, which won anAlfred I. duPont-Columbia Broadcast Journalism Award.

Tiller was a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for thirteen years, teaching and mentoring a diverse group of documentary journalists.