(English title: Deserted Memory)

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5 minutes subtitled into English of Memoria Desierta.

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Directed by: Niles Atallah
Produced by: Niles Atallah & Will Sherman
Sound: Will Sherman
Photography & Editing: Niles Atallah

Circled by lost landmines and abandoned in the driest desert on earth, the Atacama of northern Chile, Chacabuco is home to one man who has chosen to live there alone. This lone guardian has dedicated himself to re-telling the ghost town’s history as a nitrate mine and Pinochet-era concentration camp.

Memoria Desierta uses the crumbling ruins of Chacabuco to explore Chile’s buried collective memory. The film features two ex-political prisoners who re-encounter the former concentration camp for the first time in 30 years as well as the town’s original guardian who now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, despite his years of struggle for public remembrance of Chacabuco.

For more information on the documentary (screening dates, DVD release information and photos) go to the Chacabuco Project Website.

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Directed by: Charles McElroy
Pre-Production Guidance: Brian Blalock,
Raffaele Timarchi
Post-Production Guidance: Niles Atallah

Documentary made in a post-production workshop for high risk youth in Boston, USA with the PACT Project and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The workshop consisted of four weeks of an intensive seminar on the techniques of post-production in all of its stages, from creating an editing script to editing the footage filmed over a period of one year by the youth.This instruction concluded the second stage in a collaboration between filmmakers and youth with the final goal of creating the documentary entitled, HOW I VIEW about HIV.

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Directed, filmed and edited by: Niles Atallah

Journey South is a documentary on Bluesmen Robert Lowery, Robert Mitchell, Napolian Strickland, and Othar Turner. Interviews and musical performances of the musicians were filmed between 2000-2001.

Offering a glimpse of Blues musicians and territory often missed in other representations of Blues culture, Journey South focuses upon these four elderly Bluesmen in their homes and convalescent centers in Arkansas and Mississippi.

Special attention is given to the neglected aspects of the lives of these Bluesmen as well as the state of the Blues country in 2001. Blues ruins are visited: Mississippi John Hurt’s grave in Avalon and Dockery Plantation where Charlie Patton once lived and played his music.

Journey South is dedicated to these musicians, two of whom have died since filming: Napolian Strickland and Othar Turner.