Todd Chandler

Feature Length Documentary 2020
SXSW 2020 Slated World Premiere
Hot Docs 2020 Online Premiere
Winner: International Emerging Director Award

Broadcast: PBS Independent Lens

What does it mean to be safe in school in the United States? Safe from what, and from whom? Bulletproof poses and complicates these questions through a provocative exploration of fear and American violence.

more: http://bulletproof-film.com

Documentary Short, 2024
First Look Festival, World Premiere

Threat assessment is the practice of determining the credibility and seriousness of a potential threat, as well as the probability that the threat will become a reality. The goal of threat assessment is to prevent violent or harmful incidents from occurring by identifying and intervening with individuals who may pose a threat.

Filmed in Texas City, Texas at an 8-hour threat assessment training for school administrators and law enforcement, led by a former United States Secret Service agent.

15min, 2017
World Premiere: Camden International Film Festival
Streaming on PBS POV here

Across the racially and economically segregated landscape of St. Louis County, Missouri, thousands of people are routinely sent to jail because they cannot pay local court fines and fees. The vast majority of those fined are poor and are Black. In the hometown of police shooting victim Michael Brown and the surrounding municipalities, a practice with historical antecedents has become systematic: the operation of modern day debtors’ prisons. A Debtors' Prison follows two plaintiffs in an unfolding court case, Samantha Jenkins and Uni Okoli, as they describe the matrix of controls that subjected them to incarceration for being poor.

Directed by Todd Chandler and Brett Story

70min, 2013
World Premiere: Torino Film Festival
U.S. Premiere: Brooklyn Museum

A group of artists and musicians, shaken by the death of their friend, build extraordinary boats from ordinary junk and set out for open water. A collaboration with Swoon's Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, Flood Tide both documents and reimagines the real-life project.
more: http://floodtidefilm.com

2017, 14min
Directed by Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark
Premiere: Athens International Film and Video Festival

When the time comes will you be ready to grow your own food? This is the question that sends Ian Page on a punk pilgrimage from tiny community gardens in Los Angeles all the way to the Global Seed Vault.

15min, 2011
Directed by Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark
Premiere: Rooftop Films

An artist takes a crew to Chernobyl and steals pieces from an irradiated amusement park in order to make her own ride. The project makes sense but eludes logic. "What is safe? Who do I trust?" the main character asks as she explores the abandoned city, trying to imagine "what it was like to spin around while the world fell apart." The film, shot on location in Chernobyl and Manchester, U.K., follows real-life artists Franco and Eva Mattes (0100101110101101.org) and Ryan C. Doyle. Let Them Believe adds layers of fiction, historical context, and narrative to documentation. The result is a short film in conversation with and even in contradiction to the artists' actual process and intentions.

21min, 2006
Premiere: Chicago Underground Film Festival

The Road Becomes What You Leave is a meditative documentary following the band Magnolia Electric Co. as they travel across the prairies of Canada.

Directed by Todd Chandler
Photographed by Ava Berkofsky
Produced by Tim Sutton  and Secretly Canadian