Thomas Selim Wallner | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | German/Canadian |
| Occupation | filmmaker/producer/game designer |
Thomas Selim Wallner is a German/Canadian filmmaker.[1][2]
Wallner was a co-founder of Xenophile Media in 2001. He has worked with Rhombus Media since 1995.[3] Thomas Wallner is a producer, writer, director and game designer working in feature film, television, games and interactive media. In addition to producing innovative cross-media properties for television, he has written and directed eight award-winning feature documentaries that have been broadcast in more than 30 countries.[3]
A leading figure in the creation of participatory narratives he brought the underground genre of Alternate Reality Gaming into the Television mainstream, culminating in Xenophile Media's Emmy Award-winning Fallen[4][5] and Regenesis.[6][7]
In 2007 Wallner developed the story concept for Late Fragment,[8] Canada's first interactive feature drama produced by the NFB and the Canadian Film Centre.
Thomas is a recipient of numerous honours including two Emmy Awards[5] with a total of five nominations, three Geminis, a Rose d’Or, two SXSW Interactive Awards, two Webbys and two CNMA's.[9][10]
He was nominated for Interactive Producer of the Year at the 2011 CNMA awards.[11][12][13]
His documentary, The Guantanamo Trap won the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Hot Docs film festival.[14][15][16]
Wallner described being put on the "no-fly list" in 2005, after declining to submit to an iris-scan when he tried to travel to the USA.[2] He stated this was his inspiration for The Guantanamo Trap.
In Spain, criminal prosecution lawyer Gonzalo Boye, a victim of police torture himself after being sentence to 14 years in prison for allegedly assisting a kidnapping by a terrorist organization, has been working on a case against the Bush administration for unlawful detention and war crimes, including torture.
Wallner said he first started thinking about this concept when he attempted to travel to the United States, after former president George W. Bush was reelected, to research a film on Mozart. His refusal to give up his biometric data by submitting to an eye scan at Pearson International Airport resulted in an interrogation, the withholding of his passport and his placement on the American "terror list." More than five years later, Wallner's name has now been removed from that list.
Thomas also brought his expertise to the creation of the online documentary Beethoven's Hair, which accompanied the feature film of the same title for which Thomas won a Gemini Award for "Best Writing in a Documentary".
Taxi to the Dark Side and Standard Operating Procedure hallmark a growing catalogue of documentaries emerging from the War on Terror. The Guantanamo Trap is a vital addition, highlighting four interconnected biographies that reveal the impact of gross injustice.
Not that you need to be completely even-handed when discussing torture, but it's quite fascinating to hear Diane Beaver (appointed legal advisor to the camp command at Guantanamo in early 2002) talk about why she wrote that initial memo and why she does not believe that any of those techniques bordered on torture (by what she terms as "any definition" of the word you'd care to name). The film itself is quite careful to never explicitly state that any of these methods are actually torture, but it's hard to escape that conclusion when you hear people who have experienced it talk to the camera about it.