Donna Dewey
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DONNA DEWEY University of Nebraska Graduate
ACADEMY AWARD
- 1998 Best Documentary Short "A Story of Healing"
http://www.denverwoman.com/0607/arts.html
By: BONNIE MCCUNE
People with fervor are appealing. Their enthusiasm attracts supporters. People with vision are leaders. Their dream motivates action. When people possess both fervor and vision, they are nearly unstoppable.
Donna Dewey is such a person. Denver's own bit of Hollywood stardom, Dewey won an Academy Award in 1997 for her short documentary, A Story of Healing, based on the charitable work of American plastic surgeons helping Vietnamese children born with severe physical defects.
No overnight wonder, she's been slogging away at filmmaking since she was a small child in Iowa. Now she's producing independent features from her base, Dewey-Obenchain Films Inc., here in Denver.
She shares her story in bits and pieces, among the narration about her current and upcoming projects. The current film Skills Like This focuses on a failed playwright and his two friends, who change their lives when one realizes that larceny might be his best personal skill.
Although still officially unreleased, the work won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest Festival earlier this year in Austin, Texas, beating 3,200 other entries in the narrative film category. SXSW, as it's known, has become one of the world's premier film festivals, focusing on new directing talent. "The word-of-mouth has been fantastic," Dewey raves.
Since the win in March, Cinetic Media, the country's biggest independent film sales firm (they handled Little Miss Sunshine), has begun representing Skills Like This to distributors, and Dewey hopes to see it on screens within a year.
The road to this high point has been long and often rocky, strewn with rejections. But if one quality sets Dewey apart from other wannabes, it's persistence. Her journey to today's success took her from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, where her family encouraged creativity and where she gained a sense of competitiveness by participating in sports. "Sports give you persistence," she says.
Then it was on to the University of Nebraska, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in fine arts and a master's in education, the traditional female fall-back position. She did, in fact, teach for three years in the rough-and-tumble setting of Compton, California, known for its gritty urban life, complete with gangs, social problems and violence.