During Saturday night's awards ceremonies at Sundance, film editor Karen Schmeer was remembered by colleagues who were still coping with news of her death.
Prior to announcing the winner of the Dramatic Competition Editing Award, SERGIO director Greg Barker spoke about his colleague:
"I'm just going to start this off on a personal note. As Davis (Guggenheim) said, all of us documentary filmmakers would be lost without our editors and, as Laura pointed out, we all had a great loss yesterday when the editor of my film SERGIO, Karen Schmeer, was killed tragically in a hit-and-run accident in New York City. I had the incredible honor of accepting this very award and standing here a year ago for the amazing work that Karen did on SERGIO... In my filmmaking - a lot of us - we look for meaning in tragedy and experiencing it, you just don't know what the meaning is. All of us, this community here - and it is a community - have lost a very great talent and a very dear friend. So, we'll miss you Karen. Karen loved this festival and she loved editing."
A few minutes earlier, as she accepted the Cinematography Award for THE OATH, director/cinematographer Laura Poitras (with cinematographer Kirsten Johnson) noted the "terrible loss in the documentary community" and proceeded to name a number of the films that Schmeer had edited.
You can watch video of Barker's remarks here.
So sorry to hear about Karen.
http://www.myspace.com/sfarmer76
Posted by: Steven Farmer | April 13, 2010 at 10:23 AM