On Tuesday, Cal State Long Beach Film & Electronic Arts Department will be hosting “(T)error,” a documentary by Lyric R. Cabral and David Sutcliffe on an active counterterrorism investigation by the FBI.
In “(T)error,” filmmakers are witnesses of an FBI operation against terrorism. The directors are invited by Saeed Shariff Torres, the counterterrorism informant, to track him as he offers his friendship to a suspected jihadist, giving rise to legal issues.
According to Helen Hood Scheer, a documentary filmmaker and assistant CSULB professor, the purpose of this series is to “explore the difference in storytelling, the boundaries between what is ethical versus what is legal and differences between documentary filmmaking and traditional journalism.”
To Scheer, documentarians and traditional journalists share a lot of things but also differ in a substantial ways. For instance, traditional journalists have a “code of ethics” that “grants certain privileges and [they] often have support from large institutions,” Scheer said. She also said that documentarian filmmakers do not have that code, but rather they have “best practices,” which governs how they operate and they are “often operating independently, without the same restrictions or perks traditional journalists have.”
“(T)error” debuted in 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize and International Documentary Association’s Emerging Filmmaker Award.
The documentary is part of the Quandaries, a four-part series created by Scheer.
She knew she wanted to bring documentary films and filmmakers to campus since the moment she started working at CSULB last fall.
“I received a grant from the CSU Entertainment Industry, called “CSU EII Grant”, to create Quandaries, a four-part series that includes three screenings of award-winning documentary feature films, a post-screening discussion with the director of each screen and a master class with an attorney specializing in nonfiction media creation and unfair use law,” Scheer said.
Scheer’s hope is to select films that portray talented people who are not recognized by the mainstream film industry. “In part because our department is primarily white and male, my first thought was that I wanted to highlight works in which underrepresented filmmakers serve in leadership roles and present positive depictions of diverse populations onscreen; in other words, I wanted to focus on women and people of color,” she said.
The documentary is claimed to be “one of the best documentaries of 2015” by Newsweek.
The documentary will be free and open to the public. Scheer said she will soon be applying for a new grant to create more documentary film screenings and Q&As with filmmakers at CSULB, to discuss a new set of issues. The themes of the series will be revealed once the grant is awarded.
“(T)error” is the final screening in this series and will be shown at the University Theater from 7:30-9 p.m. followed by a discussion with Cabral.