About the film
Informant examines Brandon Darby, a radical activist turned FBI informant who has been both vilified and deified, but never entirely understood.
Informant
— BY Jamie Meltzer
status
Completed
type
Nonfiction
year
2012
director
Jamie Meltzer
producers
Steven Bannatyne, Adam Spielberg, George M. Rush
Synopsis
Informant examines Brandon Darby, a radical activist turned FBI informant who has been both vilified and deified, but never entirely understood.
In 2005, Darby became an overnight activist hero when he traveled to Katrina-devastated New Orleans and braved toxic floodwaters to rescue a friend stranded in the Ninth Ward. Soon after, he became a founding member of Common Ground, a successful grassroots relief organization. After two young activists were arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Darby shocked close friends and activists nationwide by revealing he had been instrumental in the indictment as an FBI informant.
About the team
Jamie Meltzer‘s (Director) feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. His current documentary project, True Conviction (in post-production), is a co-production of ITVS and the recipient of a Sundance Institute grant and a MacArthur Foundation grant. Informant (2012), was released in theaters in the US and Canada in 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith. Previous films include: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens), about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood, an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata, a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction. He is an Associate Professor and Program Director of the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University.
Informant is a Cinereach grantee.