David Schalliol

David has made short and feature-length documentary films about the human connection with place. Brief profiles of two of his major projects, The Area and Almost There, are presented below. Among other projects, he contributed the Chicago section of "Highrise: Out My Window," an interactive documentary that won the 2011 International Digital Emmy for Non-Fiction, and directed a short film for House Housing, an initiative of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center at Columbia University

David was the director, cinematographer, and co-producer of The Area, a documentary film about a South Side Chicago neighborhood being demolished to make way for an intermodal freight yard. Since September 2011, residents have been living on borrowed time, maintaining friendships and traditions while struggling with new problems in their vanishing community.

The feature-length film made its world premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The tv-hour version of the film is streaming on PBS and is part of America Reframed. It is distributed by Grasshopper Films.

The film was supported by the Graham Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and IFP Documentary Labs.

The production has been featured by Indiewire, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Public Radio, Cinefile, South Side Weekly, Chicago magazine, New City, and the Chicago Reader, among others.

Visit The Area's website for updates about the project.

David was the environmental cinematographer for the Kartemquin Films/ITVS production Almost There, which chronicles an 83-year-old artist's increasingly complex relationship with the film's co-directors, Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden. The film has screened at more than 30 film festivals and screened in theaters nationally.

Watch the trailer below, and learn more about David's approach to the film's environmental cinematography in interviews with Satellite Magazine and New City.