Critical Writing Index

Disaster Docs: Features, reality TV series, blogs and websites provide new ways to document and help victims of earthquakes around the world

by Peter Wintonick

POV, Summer 2010, no. 78, pp. 36-39, 41

In article "Disaster Docs", Peter Wintonick introduces and writes, "This is not an article about Armageddon-style disaster movies. Nor is it about the disastrous state of documentary funding. No, it's about how documentary and docweb makers respond to more natural disasters." (36) Wintonick examines three case studies as a way to think about the impact of documentaries. 1428 by filmmaker Du Haibin and co-produced by Ben Tsiang looks at the 8.0 magnitude earthquake that struck on May 18, 2008, at 14:28, and destroyed Bei-chuan city in China's Sichuan province. From Zero: People Rebuilding Life After the Emergency by docmedia producer/director Stefano Strocchi, is a long-term web-based serial documentary focusing on the 6.5 Richter-scale earthquake that hit the mountain region of Abruzzi, Italy, on the 6th of April, 2009. Inside Disaster, a collaboration between Andrea Nemtin, Katie McKenna, and Nadine Pequenza of Toronto's PTV Productions, is both a webspace and a three-part TV series documenting the aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010, and killed as many as 200,000 people and displaced millions.

ITEM 2010.037 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

1428Du Haibin and Ben Tsiang

From Zero: People Rebuilding Life After the EmergencyStefano Strocchi

Inside DisasterAndrea Nemtin, Katie McKenna, and Nadine Pequeneza