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Couple in 80s buck trend of filmmakers
(by Barbara Christian - October 12, 2012)
Couple in 80s buck trend of filmmakers
Days win environmental documentary award
By BARBARA CHRISTIAN
CHAGRIN FALLS – Alice and Lincoln Day are not who organizers had in mind three years ago when they launched the first Chagrin Documentary Film Festival.
When planners spoke about those who would enter the event and submit their work for award judging, they envisioned young filmmakers driven to tell a story artfully and with a purpose. The documentaries would be so important that they would change hearts and minds and spur viewers to action or shine the light on a cause or injustice.
Mr. and Mrs. Day, at 84, do not fit the stereotype. As it turns out, drive and determination to reveal the truth in a dynamic way is not the sole property of the young.
The couple, self-described as “sociologists and academics,” was closing in on being octogenarians when both found they had that same need to tell a story. It focused on hidden environmental casualties of war.
What happens when no one takes responsibility for picking up the mess left behind when combat is over?, the Days asked. Very little, they found out.
“We just got so mad,” Mrs. Day said of the reason she and her husband decided to make the documentary “Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War.”
An hour long, the film is packed with information and revelation as it describes the desecration of land, sea and air by bombs, land mines and chemicals. These, it points out, interrupt the food chain by killing the soil, plant life and animals and marine life, which are crucial links to the sustainability of all life.
“These are the silent casualties of war,” Mr. Day said of environmental oversight and abuses.
“It’s as simple as needing land for food and pure air to breathe,” Mrs. Day added.
To a great degree, they said, what is not happening to clean up the environment after combat has ended is in defiance of the Geneva Conventions.
The Days’ oft-awarded film has been accepted into nearly two dozen film festivals in the four years since its completion. On Friday, “Scarred Lands” won the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival’s award for Best Environmental Film.
The couple was not completely unschooled in ecological issues or filmmaking. They sit on the board of the Environmental Film Festival, and Mrs. Day notes that she and her husband are lifelong fighters for causes, whether they be social justice or the environment.
Mr. and Mrs. Day, who wrote, produced and directed the film and raised the funds to make it, agree they needed to tell the story of post-war dangers to the environment.
“Scarred Lands” traces abuses to the Civil War and its barren battlefields and concludes with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scenes include the Agent Orange-denuded jungles of Vietnam, artillery left behind in Iraq junk heaps as large as football fields, sunken Kuwaiti oil tankers left to leak their contents into the sea for generations and beached sea animals left to die in the aftermath of underwater sonic testing off the coast of Florida.
Looking back on it, Mr. and Mrs. Day agree that raising funds to make the film was comparatively easily as support for the film’s thesis was met with unanimous support from environmentalist and filmmakers.
The story that would not be denied attracted the attention of American University officials, who said, “You have a film, make it,” Mrs. Day recalled hear-ing after she and her husband made their pitch.
That university association also brought them the film’s editor, Dan Gallagher, an American University graduate student at the time. He would live with the couple in their Washington home for four years while the film was being made.
Mr. Gallagher has gone on to become an award-winning writer, producer and editor.
Additional information about Mr. and Mrs. Day, their film and how to obtain a DVD is at www.scarredlandsfilm.org.
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