Duy Linh Tu ('99 M.S.), an award-winning documentary filmmaker and associate professor of professional practice at Columbia Journalism School, recently received a 2020-21 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With the Knight Fellowship, Professor Tu is now filming “Water Up, Water Down,” a documentary film about climate change and its effects on global migration, Native American coastal communities, and the world’s rivers and oceans.
As a member of the Master of Science Program faculty, Professor Tu has taught students to create short documentary films about the subject of climate change. "Filmmaking by itself means nothing," he explained. "You can't make a film about nothing. You have to make a film about something that matters. Right now, one of the most important topics in my mind is the environment." In previous years, Professor Tu has teamed with Professor Marguerite Holloway, a distinguished science journalist, to offer the class "Storytelling About the Environment," which gave students the opportunity to gain extensive knowledge about environmental and climate change reporting while they also learned state-of-the-art documentary filmmaking skills. "She teaches the students how to think about science on a journalistic level: how to read reports, how to talk to scientists, how to find stories from these obscure white papers that come out of studies," he said. "We work together where I help the students learn how to translate their reporting into something that's entertaining. Science, when done incorrectly, can be really boring. Done correctly, science can be entertaining, informative, and important to the public."
The author of the book Narrative Storytelling for Multimedia Journalists, Professor Tu has also offered the Master of Science Program class "Multimedia Storytelling: Visual Craft," in which students learn long-form, documentary filmmaking for theatrical release or digital platforms. "There are many forms of video journalism - there's the evening news, there's the one-minute video you might see on Facebook, there's the television documentary - and my class fits into this space that is more, for lack of a better word, 'cinema,'" he explained. "If you like watching a film on Netflix, this is the class. We teach students to produce films that have great reporting, great storytelling technique, but also great aesthetics and visuals that look like a film." Over the 15-week course, students engage in field training, discuss theory, produce films, and learn about the documentary business. His class teaches shooting fundamentals, and gives students the opportunity to learn advanced cinematography, storytelling, and editing techniques.
Professor Tu also recently received a 2020 Lone Star Emmy Award for The Wait at Matamoros, a short documentary he directed which takes viewers inside a tent city in Matamoros, Mexico, where hundreds of migrants live in appalling conditions while waiting for their asylum hearings in the United States. The film can be viewed here.
When he first came to Columbia Journalism School as a member of the Class of 1999, Professor Tu worked with video technology that was quite different than what he uses - and teaches - today. Yet, he has found that his training in the Master of Science Program has allowed him to readily adapt to changes in the field. "All along the way, every job that I've had has been rooted in the fact that I know how to report, I know how to interview, I know what a story is - and that was learned at 116th and Broadway," he said. "Regardless of the job and the technology - and it may be artificial intelligence or virtual reality, or whatever comes up the pipe - I know that if I jump into that field, it's going to be rooted in the reporting and the storytelling that I learned here."
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