Oct 3, 2022 Baseline – Part 1 receives Enterprise Documentary Fund Production Grant from the International Documentary Association

Independent documentary directed by Digital Matters Graduate Fellow John Sutter, Baseline: Part 1, has received the honor of being awarded the Enterprise Documentary Fund Production Grant from the IDA (International documentary association). The grant is awarded to documentaries that investigate original contemporary stories that integrate journalistic practice into the filmmaking. “These films show that journalism is not a ‘look’ but a methodology, a practice of rigorous, ethical, and intentional truth-seeking,” says Keisha Knight, IDA’s director of funds.

John’s film explores the climate crisis through the lives of three young people living in areas greatly affected by the worsening climate and plans to revisit the same subjects between now and 2050 in order to emphasize the changes that occur outside of our daily and annual memory. In order to fully comprehend the changes that we are seeing due to climate change a much broader scope of time is needed which is an issue that John’s documentary plans to tackle.

“The project grows out of my decades of work as a journalist covering the climate crisis for CNN. I realized that the point-in-time way I’d been telling this story was not enough. We live on Human Time, focused on daily deadlines, annual performance reviews and, at most, 30-year mortgages. But the climate crisis is unfolding on Earth Time, across decades and centuries.”

Congratulations John!