‘From Mass to the Mountain’ Documents the Struggle for Fresh Water in Panama
Here’s your daily dose of an Indie film in progress — at the end of the week, you’ll have the chance to vote for your favorite. In the meantime: is this a movie you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments.
Tweetable Logline: A doc about a rural community in Panama that is plagued by drought and contaminated water sources but receives help from an unlikely source.
Elevator Pitch: “From Mass to the Mountain” is a documentary about a rural community in Panama that doesn’t have access to freshwater for months every year during the dry season. In search of a solution, members of the community try to get the government involved, but with no money and few votes to offer, their pleas fall on deaf ears. Together, they decide to search for another water source. Up in the mountains where it still rains year ’round they find a source. But the stream they find is not enough, “that’s when I knew we needed to build a dam.”
Production Team:
Kurt Sensenbrenner – Director, Writer, Co-Cinematographer
Kurt is located in Brooklyn, New York where he is working as a freelance cinematographer, AC, editor, etc. He has an MFA in Documentary Studies & Production from Hofstra University and a BFA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This is his first documentary feature.
Colin is a Milwaukee based documentary filmmaker whose work has been published on outlets such as PBS and Al Jazeera. Primarily working on social issue documentaries Colin has dedicated himself to help De la Misa a la Montaña | From Mass to the Mountain be finished.
Lucas M. Dantas – Writer, Editor
Lucas is a Brazilian journalist, writer, and film editor located in Brooklyn, New York. This is the second documentary Lucas has worked on concerning freshwater in Latin America.
Risks and challenges
About the Film: I have been working on this documentary since 2011. Going to Panama every January to film with the people of rural Panama, capturing their stories, their struggles, and their successes. A lack of freshwater unfortunately isn’t a unique problem. It is a global problem, but what this community is doing about it is extraordinary! I am honored to be able to share this community’s story with the rest of the world, please help me do that.
Current Status: In post-production/the editing and writing stage. Fundraising on Kickstarter to help with the costs of post.
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