Oscar Nominated Director Questions Reporter’s Facebook Friendship
There are only four reader comments at the bottom of a February 18th indieWIRE interview of Lucy Walker (pictured), director of the Oscar nominated feature documentary Waste Land. But the gist of those comments was enough to arouse the curiosity of Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir, who picks up on the strand of whether or not Walker is taking too much credit for the movie about life in and around Rio de Janeiro’s gigantic landfill, at the expense of her Brazilian co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley .
O’Hehir sourced a number of published interviews and spoke by telephone with Waste Land producer Angus Aynsley, who is very upfront about it all. But the most revealing aspect of the article is the tone of Walker’s email reply to the reporter’s inquiries:
Walker went on to imply, perhaps, that I was pursuing a private agenda: “I see that you are Facebook friends with Jardim, which does not surprise me, in fact I figured as much so I went to Facebook and sure enough there he was listed as one of your 272 friends.”
I have never met Jardim, and had never heard of him before beginning work on this story. I used Facebook as a means to contact him in Brazil and set up a Skype conversation… He couldn’t tell me much about Walker, he added, since he’d only met her once and never worked with her directly.
It all adds up to a potentially very interesting acceptance speech scenario if Waste Land wins Sunday.
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