POV (US television’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films on PBS) recently hosted IDA’s Doc U on the Road to examine the question “Can Your Doc Really Change the World?” with a panel of documentary heavyweights and the conversation continued afterwards with a Q&A and reception.

The panel included Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence), Rachel Libert (Semper Fi: Always Faithful, Boomtown), Diana Barrett, founder of the Fledgling Fund, and Cynthia López, Executive Vice President and Co-Executive Producer of POV.

“When I was tackling the big issue, I could have gotten lost in it. But I realized I have to tell the most compelling, engaging story I can to get people to watch. It has to be about the story first.”

    - Roger Ross Williams, director of Music by Prudence

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams took to the microphone first to set the stage for a clip of his 2010 short film Music by Prudence.

“I didn’t set out to make a film that would change the world,” said Williams. But that’s exactly what ended up happening when the film was picked up by HBO and then shortlisted and nominated for an Academy Award.

When people who had watched the Academy Awards began contacting him wanting to know how they could engage more with the issues, Williams realized he needed an actual campaign. Fledgling Fund made this possible. Williams partnered with Human Rights Watch to bring the subject of his film to the US and give her media training to become an effective advocate for the issues that were important to her. The UN, the World Bank, and UNICEF signed on as partners.

Williams believes the biggest impact the film and its campaign had was in Zimbabwe. When Prudence arrived back in her country, hundreds of journalists were on hand for her return. Her father was there, crying and apologizing for abandoning her. She made a speech about the wasted potential of disabled children strengthened by her media training. The two major newspapers in the country had editorials taking the position that Zimbabwe had to change the way disabled people were treated.

Read the full report on the event at documentary.org

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Can Your Doc Really Change the World?

Oscar Kanye Gate has received quite some attention in the past year. The New York Observer presented a list of “Best Watercooler Moments of the Year”, and guess what’s on number 5?

5. “I’mona Let You Finish” at the Oscars

Short documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams humbly stepped onstage to accept his Oscar for “Music by Prudence” when out of no where the project’s estranged producer Elinor Burkett co-opted the mike for the sake of “the women.” Williams was later invited to Larry King to finish his speech, but was, ironically, rushed for time and once again couldn’t finish!

Find the full top 11 here.

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, The Observer’s Best Water Cooler Moments

Black Book’s nightlife guru Steve Lewis talked with director Roger Ross Williams, about their wild days in the eighties, and about Music by Prudence, the Oscar upheaval, and future projects. Here are some highlights from the interview:

First off, we all know you as that guy who got shoved aside while accepting the Academy Award. Tell us about making the film, getting it out there, and the award. What was in your mind up there?
There is nothing that really describes the feeling of winning an Oscar, but I will try.  When my name was called it was as though I had won a new car on The Price is Right. ‘Come on down!’ was all I could think as I raced to the stage.  When I arrived on stage I felt the weight of the moment, the silence, the pressure, the incredible spotlight that was on me. I also felt grounded and ready to speak from my heart. My desire was to tell the world about this amazing girl and her band Liyana, and how I was so happy that everyone could finally know and love them like I had grown to know and love them. Most importantly, I was there to honor Prudence. She was in the audience that night, and I had worked hard to get her there from Zimbabwe, secure her a seat, and make sure the cameras were in position and ready to film her if we won. Of course, that speech didn’t happen.

As I was interrupted, I first felt shock, then horror, and then I quickly realized that I needed to turn the focus back to Prudence, who deserved more than anything to be acknowledged and recognized there at the Kodak Theater. Thankfully, I managed to get in the last line, mentioning that she was there, and that the Oscar was for Prudence. My crack Internet team back at the hotel had a copy of my acceptance speech and they reacted very quickly, and posted it online within ten minutes of the interruption. Our website got hundreds of thousands of hits—so many people got to read what I had to say and there was such an outpouring of love and support that I was totally in awe of the kindness of humanity. In the end, it brought more attention to the film than anything I could have ever said.

How did you come to Prudence?
I had been working in non-fiction television for many years and wanted to take the leap into independent documentary. I heard about Prudence and her band Liyana, and started writing to one of the heads of the school she attends in Zimbabwe, called King George VI. The school sent me some footage of Prudence and Liyana, and short stories written by all the band members about their lives. When I read them and saw the footage, I knew this was something special, and I was determined to make the film. I will never forget that first trip to Zimbabwe; I spent thousands of dollars of my own money and two weeks filming Prudence and the band. That original interview with Prudence is still the most poignant moment in the film, when she talks about spending years neglected lying under the mango tree left with nothing more than her own hopes, dreams, and her music.

Tell me about Sundance this year?
I just got named a Fellow of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program for my new project in East Africa. This means that, in addition to financial support, The Sundance Institute has invited me to the festival this year to meet with potential funders and pitch my new project. Making a documentary film is expensive, and we have to spend a lot of time raising funds. That is not my favorite part of the job, but with the generous help and support of organizations like Sundance, it makes the process a lot easier. I used to cover the festival for the Sundance Channel years ago and it’s an amazing experience for filmmakers. I am looking forward to going to Park City this January with my new project.

Read the full interview here.

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Blackbook Interview

Prudence and director Roger Ross Williams were interviewed by O, The Oprah Magazine:

Subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, singer Prudence Mabhena shows that “disability does not mean inability.”

Prudence Mabhena has a voice as sparkling as the bluest ocean, with a little sob of an undertow burbling beneath it. That voice pours out of Music by Prudence, a moving portrait of the 23-year-old Zimbabwe native, lead singer of the Afro-fusion band Liyana. Born with arthrogryposis, which causes severe deformation of the joints (doctors amputated her legs when she was a child), Mabhena weighs about 50 pounds and uses a 600-pound wheelchair. “When I see myself singing in the film,” Mabhena says, “I don’t know how I do it.”

As painfully recounted in Music by Prudence, which received this year’s Oscar for short-subject documentary, most of Mabhena’s family abandoned or abused her―not an unusual fate in Zimbabwe, where disability is often attributed to witchcraft. Her fortunes began to turn at age 9, when she enrolled in the King George VI School in Bulawayo (one of the few learning centers for the disabled in the country) and formed Liyana with fellow students.

Coming home in March from the Academy Awards ceremony, Mabhena was thronged by well-wishers at the airport. “With the Oscar, she is now the most famous woman in Zimbabwe, celebrated by the society that once shunned her,” says Music by Prudence director Roger Ross Williams. Currently, Mabhena is preparing for Liyana’s U.S. tour later this year (check out their peppery, marimba-tickled songs at MusicByPrudence.com). “I want to show the world that disability does not mean inability,” she says. “And I want someday to write a Broadway musical.”

Find the article, published in the June issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, on the O website.

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, The most famous woman in Zimbabwe talks to ‘O’

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a recent interview with director and producer Roger Ross Williams, on his film, Prudence, and on getting Kanyed:

As Roger Ross Williams says, laughing about it in hindsight, he holds two records in the annals of the Academy Awards. One – and this is the important one – is that he’s the first African American to win a directing Oscar, for his documentary short, “Music by Prudence.”

And two, he is the first Oscar winner to be Kanyed when he stepped up to accept his award.

Sure, there have been random Oscar-speech hijackings over the academy’s 82 years – but they were before the verb to Kanye entered the lexicon, inspired by Kanye West’s obnoxious interruption of Taylor Swift’s Video Music Awards acceptance spiel last fall.

“Yeah, I’m solidified in the academy archive,” says the Easton, Pa., native, on the road last week with the subject of his inspirational doc, Prudence Mabhena, a wheelchair-bound 21-year-old from Zimbabwe with a voice like angels. “Music by Prudence,” which Williams filmed in Zimbabwe over 2008 and early 2009, premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. on HBO2.

The Oscar-night Kanye incident – as viewers who weren’t bored silly by the otherwise somnambulistic ceremony may recall – happened when Williams, about to go into his thank-you litany, was upstaged by Elinor Burkett, his erstwhile producer.

The two had had “bad differences” over the project, as Burkett has since confirmed. A lawsuit was filed. An out-of-court settlement was struck, and Burkett was removed from the film.

But her name was still on the Oscar nomination credits, and so Burkett was there at the March 7 Hollywood ceremonies, televised the world over. She claims that she introduced Mabhena to Williams, and that without Burkett’s involvement, there would be no film. Williams acknowledges that she told him about Mabhena and her band, but says that he raised the funds, and made the inquiries and contacts that got the project rolling.

“Pretty quickly, even standing there, I realized that this was an interesting moment. This is like a moment you don’t normally see. . . . At the end, I got to point out Prudence, and that was great.”

“So unfortunately, the fact that I was the first African American to be recognized with a directing Academy Award got overshadowed,” says Williams, 37, on the phone in a van being driven (not by him) from Bethlehem to Philadelphia recently. “It didn’t get overshadowed in the African American press, but it did on E!. . .”

That said, Williams acknowledges that the usurpation on live TV brought more attention to the film – and to Mabhena, seated amid the betuxed and begowned movie-biz crowd – than it would have if his speech had gone off undisturbed. And, Williams says, Burkett’s muscling in didn’t really ruin the moment for him.

“I was certainly taken aback,” he says. “But I pretty quickly, even standing there, realized that this was an interesting moment. This is like a moment you don’t normally see. . . . At the end, I got to point out Prudence, and that was great.

“But my speech was about Prudence, and that finally the world could see the Prudence that I fell in love with, the Prudence whose spirit I was inspired by, and finally I was getting this platform to say, ‘Now you guys get to know this incredible woman.’

“That didn’t work out as planned.”

As Williams’ film describes, Mabhena has arthrogryphosis, a rare congenital disorder that deforms the joints of the body. Shuttled between family members and abused by her stepmother, Mabhena, since age 9, has lived at the King George VI School and Center for Children With Disabilities in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

“Music by Prudence” chronicles Mabhena’s life story, her childhood despair, and her musical awakening. She and several of her classmates, also with disabilities, formed a band, Liyana. She now teaches at her old school, and is using her newfound fame to become a disability rights advocate and activist.

On her current visit to the States, she and Williams are presenting the 32-minute film, followed by Q&A sessions and usually an impromptu number or two from Mabhena. (“Everywhere we go, every screening we do, someone always asks Prudence to sing,” Williams says.)

Williams, whose family is descended from the Gullah, West African slaves brought to the Carolinas to grow rice, lives in New York. He’s been working in documentaries and television for the last 15 years, but “Music by Prudence” is his first independent project. He attended Northampton Community College just outside Bethlehem, Pa., and then New York University. A journalism major, he got the movie bug when he was assigned to cover the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in the mid-’90s.

“I was so impressed by the documentary filmmakers who had taken such great risks to follow their passion,” he recalls. “The amount of energy it takes to get films made, I was so impressed by that, and by the art of filmmaking. . . . I just thought this is what I want to do. Some day I’m going to be there. I’m going to be the filmmaker.”

A decade and a half later, Williams has an Oscar – and a place in the academy’s record books.

“Not bad,” he acknowledges. “Not bad.”

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Interview: upstaged during his big moment with Oscar

A week after the Oscar event in LA, Prudence went back to Zimbabwe. But as the HBO premiere of the documentary is nearing Prudence is back in the US! She’s already been in Bethlehem, PA; Baltimore, MD; Washington, DC; and New York City. And this morning she could have been in your car, on your way to work, anywhere in the US. Prudence Mabhena and director and producer Roger Ross Williams were guests at NPR’s Morning Edition. You can listen to Renee Montagne’s interview with them right here:

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Prudence and Roger on NPR’s Morning Edition

As we now all know, on March 7th 2010, Roger Ross Williams won an Oscar for his documentary short Music by Prudence. It became quite an event…

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Roger & Oscar (video)

Prudence and Marvelous, two of the film’s stars, where guests on Ouch!, the BBC podcast about the lives and experiences of people with a disability. They were on the phone from Zimbabwe, talking to the hosts in London, while director Roger Ross Williams joined in from the US. Yes, this was very international!

Listen to the interview right here:



Check out the Ouch! website. It has articles, blogs, a very busy message board and of course, the award-winning downloadable radio show – The Ouch Podcast.

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, BBC Podcast: Ouch! It’s a Disability Thing!

The New York Times reports on hanging out with the Oscar winner for best short documentary, Roger Ross Williams, as he makes the obligatory first stop for Oscar winners and nominees.

Read the full article online, or read the print version, appearing on March 14, 2010, on page ST4 of the New York edition.

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, New York Times: A Night Out with Roger Ross Williams

The Oscar win last Sunday has been such a great gift. Not just for me, my crew, and HBO, for having made the film we wanted to make, but most of all for Prudence, her band Liyana, and the King George VI school for Children with Disabilities in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Prudence and her band members are disabled. She was abandoned and seen as a curse by the members of her family, and she has conquered so much and offers the world so much with her beautiful music.

When I started this project, I was very interested in making a film in Africa, yet I didn’t want to make a film about misery, war, or aids. I wanted to tell a story of hope.

My film focuses on a band of disabled kids, and the school they’re in. But I knew even before I went there, that the film had to have a central character, and it was obvious it would be Prudence. It became more obvious when I met her. Oh my God, I thought, she’s charismatic and brilliant, and engaging. She’s a very independent person, and she prides herself in doing what she can. But there are limitations. She gets frustrated by her challenges: going to the bathroom, eating, rolling down roads marked by potholes.

During our first interview Prudence told me things about her childhood that she never told anyone before. She cried, and I cried. In the process of being interviewed: you become self-reflective; it’s like being in therapy. She couldn’t wait to tell her story. Nobody had ever heard her story before, or asked. Afterwards, I went to the place where I was staying. I cried and cried and cried. I was just devastated. I was so moved by her strength, her ability to get beyond the moment when she was at her lowest. I was determined to get her story out there, and tell it to the world.

Being nominated for an Oscar really is a wonderful experience. Getting this huge platform for a film that started out on such a small scale, always having believed in the strong story it could tell, is just so rewarding. It opens doors.

I really hope this Oscar opens doors for Prudence, for her band Liyana, and for all the kids at KG VI, and I will do anything I can to make that happen.

Thanks, everyone, for your incredible support! And thank you Prudence, for showing us your beautiful soul, and sharing your wonderful talent. I love you.

Roger Ross Williams

Music by Prudence > Oscar winning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, Thank you, Prudence!