Gianvito Doc Premieres at Viennale Festival

A still from John Gianvito’s film

Visual and Media Arts Associate Professor John Gianvito’s documentary film Wake (Subic) will have its world premiere at the prestigious Viennale Film Festival in Austria on October 28.

The film explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

Gianvito’s feature films include The Flower of Pain; Address Unknown; and The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, winner of multiple awards, including being cited as one of the top 10 films of the year by critics in The Chicago Reader, The Boston Phoenix, and Film Comment magazine.

His 2007 documentary, Profit motive and the whispering wind, received considerable acclaim and multiple awards including “Best Experimental Film of the Year” by the National Society of Film Critics and the Grand Prize for Documentary Feature at the Belfort EntreVues Film Festival. In 2010, the magazine Time Out (New York) voted Profit motive #45 in a critics’ poll of the 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time.