Director: Sue Williams Producers: Sue Williams, Hilary Klotz Steinman
Description:
Consumers love – and live on – their smartphones, tablets and laptops. A cascade of new devices pours endlessly into the market, promising even better communication, non-stop entertainment and instant information. The numbers are staggering. By 2020, four billion people will have a personal computer. Five billion will own a mobile phone. But this revolution has a dark side, hidden from most consumers. In an investigation that spans the globe, filmmaker Sue Williams investigates the underbelly of the electronics industry and reveals how even the smallest devices have deadly environmental and health costs. From the intensely secretive factories in China, to a ravaged New York community and the high tech corridors of Silicon Valley, the film tells a story of environmental degradation, of health tragedies, and the fast approaching tipping point between consumerism and sustainability.
Biography: Sue Williams has produced and directed five critically acclaimed feature documentaries about China for national PBS broadcast, including Frontline. Contemporary China features prominently in her most recent film, Death by Design. Sue also directed two highly praised biographies on Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary Pickford for the PBS series, American Experience. Her films have been broadcast in more than twenty-five countries and appeared in festivals around the world. They have won numerous awards, including the 2016 The Boston Globe Filmmakers Fund Award.
Hilary Klotz Steinman is an Emmy award-winning independent documentary filmmaker and has been producing verite, investigative and historical documentary films for over twenty years. Hilary is currently producing Children of the Inquisition, an independent transmedia documentary film project that tells the stories of people discovering their lost or hidden Jewish roots. Hilary won an Emmy award for co-producing “The Pill,” about the history of the birth control pill for the PBS series, American Experience. As a follow up to “The Pill,” she produced and directed, “Test Tube Babies,” the story behind the development of in-vitro fertilization, also for American Experience.
