July 20, 2012
Duy Linh Tu, an assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School, has been teaching students digital storytelling techniques since 2002. So he was encouraging when a former student told him she wanted to make a documentary about the impact of HIV in the Deep South—and intrigued when she suggested he work on it with her.
He was initially hesitant. In addition to directing the school’s digital media program, where he teaches students and runs continuing education programs for professional journalists, Tu ’99 is a writer and photographer, and as a videographer has shot for all the major broadcast networks. He gave Lisa Biagiotti ’08 a non-committal answer: “Let me know when you get the funding.”
A few weeks later Biagiotti sent him an email with a picture of a $50,000 check from the MAC AIDS Fund. “She said, ‘Now you have to do it with me,’” said Tu. “It’s very natural in this field to go from mentor-mentee to collaborative partners; it happens all the time.”
Signing on as the film’s director of photography and a producer, Tu spent the next 18 months working with Biagiotti on “deepsouth,” a 72 minute-long documentary that looks at HIV in the American South.
Read more at Columbia News
Prof. Duy Linh Tu ’99 and Lisa Biagiotti ’08 talk about the making of “deepsouth.”
