Heather Courtney

Director, Producer

As Donald Trump was getting sworn in as President and the Women’s March set an angry, outspoken tone for the country’s discourse, journalist Emily Ramshaw decided to meet the moment by launching The 19th. Named after the Nineteenth Amendment, The 19th became the first nonprofit, nonpartisan news agency in the United States. Its mission is to focus on the impact of national politics and policy on women. However, by the time Emily and co-founder Amanda Zamora had secured funding and officially launched The 19th’s news site, the pandemic hit — and the very fabric of society went into a tailspin. 

Breaking the News immerses its audience in the lives and steadfast pursuits of the members of The 19th — women and LGBTQ+ journalists — as they struggle to launch the agency and work to gain traction for their newsroom amidst shuttered news outlets and an upended America. With spirited storytelling, the directorial trio of Heather Courtney, Princess A. Hairston, and Chelsea Hernandez provide an inquisitive and dynamic view into the inner workings of this news agency as its journalists disrupt entrenched biases and push for accountability.––Jose Rodriguez

Breaking The News

From a snowy small town in Northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan and back, WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM follows the four-year journey of childhood friends, forever changed by a faraway war.

A film about growing up, WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM is an intimate look at the young men who fight our wars and the families and town they come from. Returning to her hometown, Director Heather Courtney gains extraordinary access following these young men as they grow and change from reckless teenagers, to soldiers looking for roadside bombs in Afghanistan, to 23-year-old veterans dealing with the silent war wounds of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD.

Enticed by a $20,000 signing bonus and the college tuition support, best friends Dominic and Cole join the National Guard after graduating from their rural high school. Soon their group of friends joins them, and eventually the young men are sent to Afghanistan, where they spend their days sweeping for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). By the time their deployment ends, they are no longer the carefree group of friends they were before enlisting; repeated bombs blowing up around their convoys have led to TBI symptoms, and they have all become increasingly disillusioned about their mission.

The challenges really begin to surface when they return to their families and communities in Michigan. WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM looks beyond the guns and policies of an ongoing war to tell a human story about family, friendship, and community and how they all change when young people go off to fight.

WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM won the 2012 Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award, and is a co-production of Quincy Hill Films and ITVS, in association with American Documentary | POV. The film had its national broadcast premiere in Fall 2011 on PBS’s award-winning documentary series POV, and has been chosen as an encore broadcast in September 2012.

Where Soldiers Come From

THE UNAFRAID is a feature length documentary that follows the personal lives of three DACA students in Georgia, a state that has banned them from attending their top state universities and disqualifies them from receiving in-state tuition at any other public college. Shot in an observational style over a period of four years, this film takes an intimate look at the lives of Alejandro, Silvia and Aldo as they navigate activism, pursuing their right to education, and fighting for the rights of their families and communities.

​THE UNAFRAID shows us what it means to grow up both American and undocumented in the United States.

The Unafraid

POV (a cinema term for “point of view”) is television’s longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction films. POV premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and most innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, POV has presented over 500 films to public television audiences across the country. POV films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues.