Brent Huffman is a producer of Finding Yingying (2020), an MTV documentary film that premiered at SXSW in 2020 and won the Breakthrough Voice Jury Award. Finding Yingying was nominated for an Emmy in 2021 in the Best Investigative Documentary category. The film is currently streaming on Paramount+.
Brent Huffman's Saving Mes Aynak (2015) has won over 30 major awards and has been broadcast on television in over 70 countries. It can currently be seen on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and on Special Edition DVD with Icarus Films.
His new documentary, Strands of Resistance (2021), examining China's economic relationship with Pakistan, premiered on Vice and Vice News Tonight. A vignette of the documentary called Uyghurs Who Fled China Now Face Repression in Pakistan won a Rory Peck Award in the Best News Feature category at the British Film Institute in London in 2021.
Career
Born in Spencer, Ohio,[11] Brent E. Huffman studied filmmaking and worked closely with professors and documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, and James Klein. As a student, Huffman worked as an editor on Bognar and Reichert's Emmy award-winning documentary A Lion in the House. The filmmakers also let Huffman use their camera and sound equipment while he worked as a student on a documentary about the Warren County, Ohio, prison.[12] This became his first documentary, Welcome to Warren: Guards and Inmates on Life in Prison, which won a special Award of Recognition by the Grand Jury of The Discovery Channel/American Film Institute's SILVERDOCS Documentary Film Festival in Washington DC.[13] Huffman graduated with summa cum laude honors from Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH in 2002.[14]
From 2006 to 2008, Huffman taught video production, technique and theory in visual journalism at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. Throughout his teaching stint, Huffman continued to create documentary films focusing on international topics pinned to China. The Colony (2010), exploring China's new economic role in Africa, aired on Al Jazeera. The film screened in the academic and research context as well, with Huffman invited by the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, to lead a symposium about China's increasing presence in Senegal. With The Colony, Huffman gave lectures about China's role in Africa at USC's US/China Institute,[19]Princeton University,[20] and Columbia University.[21][22] Before moving on as a professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Huffman covered Vortex 2, the world's largest tornado research project, for NBC Universal and The Weather Channel.[23]
In 2007, China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. The New York Times reported: "Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China."[24] Reading further reporting on the New York Times on the involvement of China and U.S. government in the mineral reserves in Afghanistan,[25] Huffman began his research into this subject and began filming in Mes Aynak on his own in 2011.[26] On top of the copper reserve in Mes Aynak, it turns out, is an archaeological excavation site, uncovering "thousands of Buddhist statues, manuscripts, coins, and holy monuments ... Entire monasteries and fortifications ... dating back as far as the third century", according to a National Geographic report.[27] However, the site was surrounded by danger: during his stay, Huffman was never allowed to stay in the Mes Aynak area due to the threat of the Taliban. Huffman went through substantial scrutiny and restrictions from the Afghan and U.S. officials: every time he visited the site, he had to go through the permission process from the Ministry of Culture, Kabul Police, and the local province. The Afghanistan-U.S. embassy declined to be interviewed for the film and did not allow American archaeologists working in Mes Aynak to be interviewed for the film.[28]
By 2012, Huffman's account of the struggles of archaeologists in Mes Aynak was published on CNN, an "Op-Doc" on The New York Times, NPR, the Tricycle Magazine, among others. Huffman traveled around universities and museums around the U.S. showing his footage from Mes Aynak.[29] The footage was also used by the Smithsonian Museum to educate members of the U.S. State Department about the situation at the ancient Buddhist archaeological site in Mes Aynak.[30][31] Huffman launched a Kickstarter campaign to help Afghan archeologists purchase digital cameras and computers for their facility and to help pay for the film's production costs. The campaign raised more than $35,000[32] and helped the story of Mes Aynak reach a huge international audience, which resulted in online[33] and street protests against the mining of Mes Aynak.[34] With the donation from Kickstarter and a grant from MacArthur Foundation, Huffman finished the project, which became Saving Mes Aynak.[35] In 2014, Saving Mes Aynak was invited by the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, for a private screening.[36] Due to dangers of Taliban and opposition to the demolition of the archaeological excavation site, China Metallurgical Group Corp has delayed its mining operation in Mes Aynak.[37]
As of 2016, Saving Mes Aynak continues to be shown widely in universities, museums, and film festivals across the U.S. and around the world.[40] The main subject of the documentary Qadir Temori is now the director of the Afghan Institute of Culture, leading the effort with the Oriental Institute and the Afghanistan U.S. Embassy to create a satellite-based map database of Afghanistan's cultural heritage sites and train young Afghans in the field of archaeology.[41] The film remains free to watch for people in Afghanistan.[42] In 2015,
In an interview with Audience Everywhere, Huffman announced that he is working on a new project on China's presence in Pakistan.[43]
2005: Bronze Award - Worldfest International Film Festival for The Weight of the World
2004: Special Award of Recognition by the Grand Jury of The Discovery Channel/American Film Institute's SILVERDOCS Documentary Film Festival for Welcome to Warren: Guards and Inmates on Life in Prison
^Bognar, Steven; Reichert, Julia (2006-07-28), A Lion in the House, retrieved 2016-02-15
^"What If…". German Camera Productions | Documentary Films by Brent E. Huffman and Xiaoli Zhou. Archived from the original on 2016-02-23. Retrieved 2016-02-15.
