Midlander wins national film award
Category: Local... Movies...
Posted Sunday, July 17, 2005 at 08:05 PM [GMT-6]

I returned to Midland this afternoon after a pleasant weekend at a family reunion in Cloudcroft, NM and found this story buried deep within today's edition of the local newspaper:

American Express and Tribeca Film Festival founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, have announced that director/writer Jon Lindgren of Midland is the grand-prize winning filmmaker of the Amazon Theater/Tribeca Film Festival Short-Film Competition for "Rachel's Challenge."

Lindgren will receive $50,000 to fund his next film project, to be awarded from American Express.

OK, how cool is that? Jon is a longtime Midlander and owner of ViaMedia, an advertising and video production company. Much of his is work focused on projects with Christian themes. His winning entry in the Tribeca Film Festival, while not overtly Christian, deals with the fundamental struggle between good and evil that played itself out in the Columbine High School shootings. The Rachel referred to in the film's title is Rachel Scott, who testified to her belief in God even as she lay wounded and immediately before she was executed by one of the teen-aged killers.

You can view the seven-minute film on Amazon.com's website. Even viewed via the tiny window on a monitor, the production values and creativity of Jon's work shines through. I think Midland should be very proud of his accomplishment and I hope he gets well-deserved additional publicity from it.

Update: Jeff McDonald has provided a link to an earlier local news story about this film.

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Comments

Eric, we ran this story a couple of weeks back at newswest9.com, and I was thrilled to post it. I have known Jon for years, back when I was over at Big 2, and he was at PJ ... do you remember his "Street level Videos" ?

Jon is one talented and hard-working individual, and I am SO pleased to see that talent and hard work rewarded!

Posted by: Jeff at July 18, 2005 10:45 AM

Jeff, this is the first I heard about the film and the award; thanks for the link. I've updated my original post with it.

Perhaps I just missed the coverage, but I'm surprised local bloggers didn't make a bigger deal out of this.

And yes, I do remember Street Level Videos, which is where I first encountered Jon's name.

Posted by: Eric at July 18, 2005 11:44 AM
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