BR native wins another award
Print
Email
Save
Twitter
Social Media
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Reddit
Baton Rouge native and award-winning filmmaker Lawrence Cumbo has received another honor, this one halfway around the globe.
Cumbo, with his family, was on hand to accept the Sheikh Zayed trophy last month at the first ANASY Best Documentary Festival competition in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. ANASY Co. for Media Production sponsored the awards, which recognized Cumbo for his contribution to factual films about the Middle East.
Cumbo, who has worked for National Geographic in positions including as an executive producer, is well-known in the region for his award-winning documentary “The Search for the Afghan Girl.” In 1984, the mesmerizing face of a young Afghan refugee, Shabat Gula, appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine, the image conveying to the world the despair of war in her homeland. In 2004, the photographer, Steve McCurry, who took the haunting photo, went in search of the girl, and Cumbo accompanied him to document the successful journey. He wrote, produced and filmed the piece.
Another Cumbo project, 2003’s “Miracle Doctors,” focused on a Nepalese eye surgeon who restores sight to the blind in impoverished areas of Nepal and Tibet.
Also in 2003, Cumbo came home to Louisiana to film “Mothers Behind Bars” for the “Ultimate Explorer” series. Here, Cumbo took his cameras inside the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel. The program focused on the effects on children whose mothers are incarcerated. The program also featured a huge prison complex in New Delhi, India.
“This award was one of the highest honors I’ve received,” Cumbo said by e-mail Wednesday. “I have spent almost two decades focusing my camera on those less fortunate and often forgotten about in mainstream media. To share this with my family was particularly special because my wife, Julie, is the one who stays behind to take care of my two daughters during these often dangerous filming situations.”
Cumbo said as part of the preparation for the awards ceremony, he was filmed in a 3D hologram in Dubai while being interviewed by a prominent journalist there. The hologram was played during the ceremony and Cumbo walked out of the hologram live to a stunned audience.
“Very cool,” he said.
In 2005, Cumbo told The Advocate how his first documentary, made while still in school in Florida and at a cost of $500, changed his future. The piece was about an elderly, disabled man named Tom Wise, who lived in Florida. On a whim, he entered it in the Florida Film Festival and it won.
“We had a screening at Universal Studios and I was hooked. It was a packed house, and people were responding, and Tom was there in the audience and people cried and laughed, and that’s the moment I realized that I needed to be making movies, making documentary films.”
Cumbo’s last project with National Geographic was a special called “Drowning New Orleans,” made after Hurricane Katrina. He then went on to work for London-based Tiger Aspect and Tigress Production, running their U.S. production.
Cumbo started making films in a new locale, New Zealand, this month. He and his family, which includes a wife and two daughters, made their stop in Abu Dhabi en route to their new home in Dunedin, New Zealand, where Cumbo has begun work as an executive producer for documentary production company NHNZ. His first projects will be the second series of “Orangutan Island” and “Dark Days in Monkey City” for Animal Planet and “I Survived” for A&E and the Biography Channel.
“We are so happy here. It actually feels like my home in Baton Rouge. People here say ‘hi’ on the street, everyone is very laid back, they are obsessed with their sports teams. They have great food and coffee, although my mom and dad (Helen and Larry Cumbo) still send me Community Coffee.”
 | ||||
| Most Popular | Most Emailed | Hot Topics | ||
