Creator
Janet Gardner
Janet Gardner is a documentary director and producer whose films include Dancing Through Death, about Cambodian classical dance.
Janet Gardner is an American documentary director and producer whose films include Dancing Through Death: The Monkey, Magic & Madness of Cambodia.[1][2] She works through the Gardner Documentary Group, based in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey, which she founded in 1990 to make educational documentaries.[1][3]
Career
Gardner studied at Cooper Union and at New York University's Graduate Institute of Film and Television, now the Tisch School of the Arts.[1] She began in television as a field producer, film editor and news writer for NBC News, WNBC-TV, WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., and CBS News.[1] As a print journalist she was a feature writer for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and contributed to The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe.[1] Her interest in Southeast Asia began while she was covering postwar Vietnam for American newspapers.[4]
She won several industry awards for a trilogy of documentaries told from the Vietnamese perspective. Her Vietnam films include A World Beneath the War (1997), nominated for an Emmy, about the secret tunnels used during the war; Precious Cargo, made with ITVS, which follows Vietnamese adoptees from Operation Baby Lift on their return to Vietnam; and Last Ghost of War, which follows the court cases that came out of wartime herbicide spraying.[1][5] Her later films include Mechanic to Millionaire: The Peter Cooper Story (2010), about the founder of Cooper Union, which won a CINE award, and Quakers: The Quiet Revolutionaries. In 2015 the Guggenheim Foundation gave her a fellowship for her body of work and for the Quaker film.[1][5]
Cambodian films
In 1990 Gardner visited Phnom Penh with a delegation of the U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project, taking photographs for the United Nations. There she watched young monkey dancers practice. "The dance was astonishingly beautiful, and I knew that it was threatened," she later said.[6] In Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border she met the anthropologist Toni Shapiro and the dancer Thavro Phim. She learned that trained court dancers had been marked for death under the Khmer Rouge because of their tie to the royal palace.[4][6]
She produced, directed and wrote Dancing Through Death: The Monkey, Magic & Madness of Cambodia (1999), an hourlong film about how Cambodian classical dance survived.[2][6][5] It tells the story of Thavro Phim, who came of age under the Pol Pot regime and lost his father, brother and grandfather. His devotion to the dance and to his role as the magical white monkey kept him whole.[7] The film follows him on a return to Cambodia in 1998 to meet surviving family and teachers, and to a prison museum where he looks for clues to his father's fate.[6][4] It also shows the dance being studied in Lowell, Massachusetts, and San Jose, California.[4] The film won a CINE Golden Eagle in 1999 and was broadcast on PBS in 2007.[2][3]
Lost Child: Sayon's Journey is the story of a former Khmer Rouge child soldier, Sayon Soeun. Gardner directed it and co-produced it with Sopheap Theam, and she traveled to Cambodia to research and film it.[1][3] It premiered at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival in November 2013, played at the Trenton Film Festival in 2014 and won festival awards. WNET presented it for broadcast on PBS stations from April 2015 to 2018.[3][1] On April 26, 2014, it was shown at the Buddhist Temple in Philadelphia for Cambodian New Year.[8]
Works
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Gardner Documentary Group, About
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Gardner Documentary Group, Dancing Through Death
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Lost Child: Sayon's Journey, Press (2013)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 University at Buffalo Reporter, Film documents plight of Cambodian dancers (October 17, 2002)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Princeton Magazine, Making Noise About Quiet Revolutionaries (October 21, 2015)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Los Angeles Times, Dancing Through the Dark (February 15, 2000)
- ↑ Gardner Documentary Group, home page
- ↑ Princeton Comment, Janet Gardner: Uncovering History (April 22, 2014)