Ballplayer Pelotero: Opening Nationwide Friday, July 13, 2012

Ballplayer: Pelotero, produced by two IGL alums, opens nationwide on Friday, July 13.

 

 

Ballplayer: Pelotero director Trevor Martin graduated from Tufts University in 2008 with a degree in International Relations.  His interest in documentaries can be traced back to his freshman year at Tufts, when he and fellow Tufts alumni Julian Roberts ('08) and Justin Saint Cyr ('07) approached Sherman Teichman at the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) about funding a trip to Bogotá, Colombia to shoot a feature doc about growing violence against human rights defenders.  The resulting work, Silencing Justice, was screened nationally and internationally, including a special screening at the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman in Bolivia, and the Centro de Estudios Sociales y Legales (CELS) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as being an official selection of the International Student Film Festival Hollywood.  In 2007, Martin returned to Colombia again with the support of Tufts' IGL to produce the award-winning short documentary 10 Years.  The team shot the film mostly on-location in Sucre, Colombia in order to document alliances between right-wing drug-trafficking paramilitary death squads and Colombian politicians, many of whom were later convicted for crimes such as murder and extortion.  In addition to being screened at organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Washington Office on Latin America, the film has been acquired by universities around the country to be used as course-work on Colombia including the University of Pennsylvania, American University, and George Washington University among others.  10 Years was also an Official Selection of the Macedonia Film Festival.  

 

 

Since 2004, Casey has been directing and producing independent documentary films, highlighting otherwise untold stories. In 2007, she directed and produced The Rising Tide: Kiribati, which detailed the effects of global warming on a developing island-nation in the Central Pacific. The documentary was funded by the Davis United World College's 100 Projects for Peace and won the World Bank Micro-Documentary Film Contest "Vulnerability Exposed." It premiered at Tufts in conjunction with an exhibit at Slater Concourse entitled "The Rising Tide: Kiribati - Acclimation for the Air-Conditioned Mind," a collaboration among the Institute for Global Leadership, the Peace and Justice Studies Department, the LGBT Center and Urban Environmental Policy Planning.  In 2008, Casey received a Fulbright grant to produce a feature-length documentary in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since working on Ballplayer: Pelotero, she has spent her time directing her current feature length documentary The Organic Life.