Grit

Cynthia Wade & Sasha Friedlander - 2018 - United States / Indonesia - 80 min

When Dian was six years old, she heard a deep rumble and turned to see a tsunami of mud barreling towards her village. Her mother scooped her up to save her from the boiling mud. Her neighbors ran for their lives. Sixteen villages, including Dian’s, were buried under 60 feet of mud.

A decade later, 60,000 people have been displaced from what was once a thriving industrial and residential area in East Java. Dozens of factories, schools and mosques are completely submerged under a moonscape of ooze and grit.

The cause? Lapindo, an Indonesian company drilling for natural gas in 2006, unleashed a violent, unstoppable flow of hot sludge from the earth’s depths. It is estimated that the mudflow will not end for another decade.

Shot over the course of six years, GRIT bears witness to Dian’s transformation from young girl to a politically active teenager as she and her mother launch a resistance campaign against the drilling company.

Watch the trailer:

Grit Official Trailer from Sasha Friedlander on Vimeo.

Director: Cynthia Wade & Sasha Friedlander

Cynthia Wade’s 2008 documentary Freeheld won a 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject, Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and 13 other awards. She was a lead producer on the 2015 fictionalized adaptation of Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Steve Carell and Michael Shannon. Wade’s 2013 HBO documentary Mondays at Racine was nominated for an Academy Award in 2013. She is the director of the documentaries Grist for the Mill (1999, HBO), Shelter Dogs (2004, HBO), Born Sweet (2009), Living the Legacy (2009, Sundance Channel) and Generation Startup (2016, Netflix), and producer of The Gnomist (2015, CNN). She holds a BA from Smith College and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University. Wade has won more than 45 film awards worldwide.

Sasha Friedlander directed, produced, shot and edited the feature-documentary Where Heaven Meets Hell. The film, set in East Java, Indonesia, won numerous prizes including Best Feature Documentary Film at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival and Special Mention for Outstanding Cinematography at the LAAPFF. At the One World International Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, the Václav Havel Jury gave a Special Mention Award to Where Heaven Meets Hell for its “exceptional contribution to the defense of human rights.” The Alliance of Women Film Journalists awarded Sasha an EDA Award for Documentary Artistry in March 2013. This ITVS-funded film aired on PBS in 2013. Sasha's has lived and worked in Indonesia. She is fluent in Indonesian and worked there as a journalist for several years. Sasha holds a BA from UCLA and an MFA in Social Documentary Film from the School of Visual Arts.