About this project

Dark Horizon is a feature documentary about the BP oil disaster that tells the stories of those most impacted and confronts those most responsible. Unlike many other documentaries about environmental disasters, ours is entertaining, funny, and exciting, and not only sad, frustrating, and overwhelming.
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Toward the end of May, Scott Andrews and I rode our motorcycles from Brooklyn to New Orleans with the intention of beginning a documentary about people directly affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We’d heard that BP was paying out of work fishermen to clean the oil, and we wanted to hear some of their stories. A friend suggested Grand Isle (this was before President Obama, or famous news anchors had made the town well known), so down we went. At first the fishermen were closed off and unwilling to appear on camera. After three days of documentary filmmaking that felt a bit like investigative journalism, we found our subjects and ended up with some great footage, (as seen in the accompanying trailer.)

Now, we need to go back. We've applied for grants and other funding, and we're confident that such money will come. But grants take a while, and the oil gushes daily. $5,000 isn't going to fund this whole movie, but it is going to enable us to go back and shoot more in the immediate future so that this piece can stay timely.

As we keep shooting, we will keep cutting and raising money so that we can continue to thoroughly cover and investigate this oil explosion. (It's really not a spill, now, is it?)

Our ultimate goal is to make a feature documentary about this massive disaster. Although the structure of the feature will continually shape, presently we envision it as the story of a tremendous mistake told through characters who are directly and gravely impacted. Additionally, this film will be one of investigation. There are many questions pertaining to this catastrophe that have been unsatisfactorily answered, if at all. For example, why did overseers allow so many safety exemptions to the rig? Why are cleanup crews still using a carcinogenic dispersant? Why is the topic of America's addiction to petroleum hardly being broached?

We will ask challenging questions, go after those reticent to answer, and look at the big picture. Still, we will tell our story microcosmically, through individuals greatly impacted. There is a ton of media about this issue, and no doubt, multiple documentaries in the works. Ours will be different because our primary objective is to tell our story while entertaining our audience. Many "issue films" get caught up in their issue, indeed powerful in and of itself, at the expense of the art of the film. By staying focused on entertaining storytelling, we will attract a wider group of viewers and affect people who might not otherwise be interested in this oil spill.