VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK)

Year2010 Duration264 min. DirectorJohn Gianvito PhotographyJohn Gianvito EditorJohn Gianvito

In the summer of 2006, John Gianvito flew from Boston to Manila in search of locations for a fiction film. However, when he learnt about the situation of thousands of Filipinos living in communities surrounding the toxic sites at the US military bases Clark Air and Subic Naval, he chose to tell their story. These people’s “drinking water” is full of carcinogenic substances and other polluting elements, its intake leading to an increased incidence of miscarriages, heart disease, nervous conditions, and cancer. Nobody takes responsibility for this. Vapor Trail (Clark) is a reflection on historical amnesia, the abuses of colonialism, and the consequences of uncontrolled militarism.

Festivals
Rotterdam International Film Festival 2010; Ljubljana Documentary Film Festival 2010; Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema 2010; Jeonju International Film Festival 2010; Migrating Forms Festival/New York 2010; Distrital Film Festival/Mexico City 2010; Maine International Film Festival 2010; Vancouver International Film Festival 2010; London Film Festival 2010, DocLisboa, Portugal 2010; Viennale Film Festival, Austria 2010; Sheffield Doc/Fest 2010; Unknown Pleasures-American Independent Film Festival/Berlin 2011.

John Gianvito

John Gianvito. Living in Boston, Massachusetts, John Gianvito is a filmmaker, professor, and exhibition curator. The first retrospectives of his work were held at the Viennale and “I Mille Occhi” in Trieste. Moreover, his films have screened at New York’s MoMA, Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1990s, he worked as a programmer at the Harvard Film Archive. In 2001, he received the Knight medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. Having authored Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, Gianvito has also taught Film Production and History of Film at the University of Massachusetts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Boston University. His previous film, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), entered over 50 international film festivals; it was chosen by Time Out as one of the best films of the decade. At present, Gianvito is an associate professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts, Emerson College.

Selected filmography
Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010)
Profit motive and the whispering wind (2007)
Puncture Wounds (September 11^th) (2002)
The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001)
What Nobody Saw (1990)
August 6^th (1988)
Address Unknown (1986)
The Flower of Pain (1983)