Interview Co-Directors Josh Izenberg and Brett Marty about their Oscar Qualified Short ECO-HACK!

JOSHUA IZENBERG is a documentary filmmaker based in the California Bay Area. His film, SLOMO (2013), won over a dozen awards, including best short documentary at SXSW, premiered as a New York Times Op-Doc, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. His subsequent film, the Netflix Original, Resurface, won the Jury Prize at Tribeca and was nominated for an Emmy. He’s since co-directed the short documentaries Game Hawker (2022) for Patagonia Films and Eco-Hack!, which won audience awards at HotDocs and Palm Springs, and premiered with The New Yorker in July 2023.

BRETT MARTY cut his teeth as a commercial director and made the transition to filmmaking with a handful of documentary and narrative shorts, which have won their share of jury awards and played at 100+ film festivals, including Cannes, and were commissioned by The New Yorker, Patagonia Films, and National Geographic. He also studied sculpture at UC Berkeley, and even drove an old Buick from San Francisco to Argentina.

Both have co-directed the Oscar-qualifying short film documentary ECO-HACK! It follows biologist Tim Shields down an unconventional route to save the Desert Tortoise.

ECO-HACK! Received its Oscar-qualified status after winning Best Documentary Short at the Palm Springs International ShortFest and HotDocs International in Toronto.

TIM SHIELDS, the subject of the film has some four decades of experience out in the field as a biologist, logging some 25,000 miles on foot, surveying, and making critical observations. Those observations of the Mojave’s desert tortoise led to his founding of Hardshell Labs — and a slew of inventions, innovations, and techniques for protecting endangered species around the world. https://www.mountainfilm.org/films/eco-hack/
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