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Best Documentary. Best National Feature Documentary. Best Minnesota Made Documentary. Audience Award. Audience Choice. Best Production Design. Best Director.
Film festivals nationwide last year piled accolades on “Love Them First: Lessons From Lucy Laney Elementary,” a feature-length documentary produced primarily by two journalists from one Twin Cities TV station.
Lindsey Seavert and Ben Garvin had each worked at KARE-TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul for several years when they embarked on a series of stories about a local elementary school. That series quickly became the foundation for a documentary, and that documentary has since left an extraordinary mark on the education world. Its main character, Lucy Laney principal Mauri Melander Friestleben, has even appeared on the Today Show.
You can watch it right here:
Seavert and Garvin are my guests on Episode 75 of the Telling the Story podcast.
“With a flicker and another flicker, you can set the world on fire and create systemic change,” Seavert told me. “That’s really my hope: that we’ve sparked a national conversation about how we measure children.”
They’ve sparked it. And last month, Seavert and Garvin were honored at Columbia University with a duPont Award – or, as one colleague of mine called it, “the Pulitzer of video.”