Tough Choices, Innovative Responses: EFF and Pulitzer Center Filmmakers Roundtable

On Friday, March 25, 2022, please join Pulitzer Center-supported filmmakers and journalists Michelle Lotker, Frank Graff, Duy Linh Tu, and Rickey Ciapha Dennis Jr. for a roundtable as part of the 30th anniversary of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital.

They will discuss everything—from their own reporting, to insights into the process of creating short documentaries. They will also respond to audience questions as part of the EFF Pulitzer Center program, “Shifting Coastlines: Tough Choices, Innovative Responses.”

In addition to the roundtable, this program will bring together a series of short films supported by the Pulitzer Center and its Connected Coastlines Initiative. It will explore how coastal communities around the United States are facing tough choices while creating innovative responses to climate change.

All of the films are available for free screening throughout the Environmental Film Festival March 18-27, 2022.

Lotker and Graff are directors of Feeding the Beach, which explores solutions to North Carolina’s eroding coastline. Lotker also directed Squeezing the Marsh, documenting the importance of marshes as habitats for animals like the saltmarsh sparrow. Tu is the director of Uprooted and of The Last Holdouts, with the latter focusing on Louisiana and the Indigenous people of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, who are fighting against climate change and coastal erosion. Dennis is a reporter for The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina) and part of a team also supported by the Connected Coastlines initiative.

Learn more about the filmmakers and journalists below and about their films:

Tu is a journalist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on education, science, and social justice. Tu is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches reporting and video storytelling courses.

Lotker is an award-winning cinematographer, producer, and editor with a science and journalism background that allows her to communicate science in a broadly engaging way. Her work focuses on using people-centered, documentary-style storytelling to communicate scientific research and environmental issues. She has been featured at several film festivals, including the International Wildlife Film Festival.

Graff is an Emmy Award-winning producer/reporter with PBS North Carolina (formerly UNC-TV), with more than 30 years of broadcast journalism experience. Graff’s storytelling skills have earned recognition from The Associated Press and the Society of Professional Journalists. He applies his WIIFM ("What’s in it for me?") rule to science reporting, making complex science topics easy to understand and explaining how science relates to everyday life.

Dennis grew up in South Carolina and studied print journalism at Winthrop University. He has five years of reporting experience, and he currently covers the city of North Charleston and the religious community for The Post and Courier. His Pulitzer Center-supported project focused on flooding and the impact of climate change in Charleston.

Connected Coastlines is the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide climate reporting initiative in U.S. coastal states. This initiative has supported 26 reporting projects, yielding 130 stories published by 39 media outlets on every U.S. coastline, including Alaska and Hawaii.

This reporting initiative is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education, the One Earth Fund, the Hartfield Foundation, as well as the Pulitzer Center's many individual donors and funders.