PEOPLE VS. AGENT ORANGE'S Filmmakers Up Next On Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM

Filmmakers Kate Taverna and Alan Adelson, composer Roman Molino Dunn, and YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY director, Amjad Abu Alala, join Tom Needham on the next SOUNDS OF FILM.

THE PEOPLE VS. AGENT ORANGE shows that the Agent Orange catastrophe did not end with the Vietnam War. The herbicide still wreaks havoc on the human genome, causing deformed births, illnesses and deadly cancers. Sixty years later, the world over, 2,4,-D, a primary component of the toxic defoliant, still controls weeds in farming, forestry, parks, even on children's playgrounds.

After decades of struggle and tragic personal losses, two heroic women are leading a worldwide movement to end the plague and hold the manufacturers accountable.

In France, Tran To Nga is suing the American chemical industry for poisoning her in Vietnam - a lawsuit she filed in 2014 against the corporations that produced and sold the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange. The suit includes U.S. multinational companies Dow Chemical and Monsanto, now owned by the German conglomerate Bayer. Final pleadings in her case were heard in a French court at the end of January 2021 with a decision due in May.

In America, Carol Van Strum exposes the continuing use of toxic herbicides in the Pacific Northwest. A suspicious fire destroys her home. Incriminating documents disappear. Activists are threatened. A helicopter technician secretly films the on-going contamination of reservoirs, while a massive industrial cover-up goes on.

The film opens in New York, Los Angeles, and in over 20 other cities on March 5th.

Kate Taverna and Alan Adelson produced and co-directed In Bed with Ulysses as well as Lodz Ghetto. Both of these widely acclaimed films had nationwide theatrical releases. Lodz Ghetto was short-listed for the feature documentary Oscar. The filmmakers also collaborated on Two Villages in Kosovo, and Agent Orange: La derniere bataille, both television documentaries commisioned by ARTE for broadcast in France and Germany.

Alan Adelson works in both film and print. A page-one investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he made worldwide headlines exposing the disappearance of enough enriched plutonium to make two Hiroshima-sized bombs. Early in his journalistic career he published investigative articles on the chemical industry.

Kate Taverna has edited more than fifty films over her career: Asylum and Killing in the Name were the Academy Award nominees in the Best Short Documentary category in 2004 and 2011 respectively. The feature length Pray the Devil Back to Hell won the Best Documentary award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. She's Beautiful When She's Angry won the Audience award at the 2014 Boston Independent Film Festival, released theatrically nationwide and was translated into 22 languages and shown globally on Netflix. Her broadcast editing work has been seen on CBS, IFC, A&E, BBC and PBS, among others.

Huracán is about an aspiring MMA fighter who suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder and delves into his mental illness with a pioneering but troubled psychologist. Cassius Corrigan and Yara Martinez star.

Roman Molino Dunn is an award-winning composer, Billboard-charting music producer (a.k.a Electropoint), and co-owner of Mirrortone Studios in New York City.

YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY follows a child - portended to die at age 20 - as he and his mother navigate the uncharted space between coming of age and facing the end. An exceptional story and only the eighth narrative feature film to be made in Sudan, YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY follows Muzamil (played first by Moatasem Rashid, then as a teen by Mustafa Shehata), whose death at age 20 is prophesied on the day of his birth by a traveling sheik.

Growing up with his mother, Sakina (Islam Mubarak), in a small village under the constant loom of death, the young boy becomes increasingly curious about what it means to live beyond his mother's confines. Encouraged by local elders, his overprotective mother relents and allows her son to study the Quran with the other children his age. In this newly found freedom, Muzamil finds friends, enemies, love, and tempters, though what he truly seeks is a sense of the present and a chance at the future.

Amjad Abu Alala's YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY is only the 8th Narrative Feature filmed in Sudan and Sudan's First official Entry for "BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM" in the 93rd ACADEMY AWARDS.

THE SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film, music, and ideas themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Alec Baldwin, Billy Joel, Connie Stevens, Carter Burwell, Alex Winter, Dionne Warwick, Jason Biggs, Nile Rodgers, Eric B, Vanilla Fudge and Chuck D.

Worldwide listeners can tune into the SOUNDS OF FIlM internet livestream on Thursday at 6 pm EST at wusb.fm.

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