The Blackfeet Flood

Benjamin Shors is a writer and documentary filmmaker who grew up on the northern plains of Montana. In 2013, he began to collect oral histories of the 1964 flood on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, archiving more than 20 interviews with survivors of the worst natural disaster in Montana history. Those interviews led to six documentary shorts for PBS Indies, and led him to produce and co-direct The Blackfeet Flood, which tracks the lives of two families struggling to reconcile with the flood’s lasting trauma. He teaches journalism at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.

Torsten Kjellstrand has a rich history of documenting stories in underrepresented and misrepresented communities in both photographs and film. His documentary film Finding Refuge explores the efforts of one Alutiiq/Sugpiaq woman to reconnect with her present culture by confronting a brutal event in the colonization of her people on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Finding Refuge was broadcast on public television through NETA, and has won awards in several festivals. Kjellstrand is a Professor of Practice at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, and has been a National Photographer of the Year, a Fulbright Scholar to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.