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Adjunct wins best short documentary at Cannes Independent Film Festival
Mike Walter’s documentary film “Breaking News, Breaking Down,” about journalists and how they cope – or don’t cope – with trauma, has been named best short documentary at the 2010 Cannes Independent Film Festival .
It is the latest in a string of awards for Walter, an independent filmmaker and adjunct broadcast instructor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, who was driven to produce the film after wrestling with his own emotions as a witness to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. Walter had to immediately turn around and try to report the story as a dispassionate journalist for USA Today Live.
The 36-minute film that grew out of that incident took two years to complete. It focuses mostly on the reporters who followed Hurricane Katrina to do clean-up work in New Orleans and ended up sharing their stories of covering trauma. But the film also ranges from coverage of the 9/11 attacks to the numbing regularity of reporters covering the everyday breaking news of murders, fires and crashes.
In the film, Walter also turns the camera on himself to talk about how a lifetime of covering trauma has affected him and those around him.
Walter, an Emmy Award-winning reporter, spent 25 years as a broadcast reporter in several markets, most recently as a reporter and anchor at WUSA, the CBS affiliate in Washington. He was laid off from WUSA in early 2009 and is now president and CEO of Walter Media.
The Cannes Independent Film Festival was founded in 2008 to give independent filmmakers a high-profile venue for their work alongside the famous Cannes Film Festival, which was founded in 1946. The two festivals are independent of one another.