Mary Rosanne Katzke

Mary Rosanne Katzke is a documentary film maker, writer and photographer known mostly for Alaska-based documentaries bringing attention to a variety of social and healthcare issues—including sexual assault, domestic violence, mental illness, homelessness and breast cancer. Since 1982, she has produced dozens of grant-funded documentaries through her nonprofit production company Affinityfilms, Inc., based in Anchorage.

Born in the mid-1950s and raised in southern Minnesota, Mary Rosanne Katzke learned filmmaking from her father, Gus, who first taught her the skills needed to make her first home movies and 8mm films.

In 1981, she produced her first documentary film, No Word for Rape. The 16mm film about sexual assault in urban and rural Alaska won awards at film festivals in Seattle, Chicago and Anchorage, and was used by Alaska-based crisis center workers for at least a decade.

In 1982, Katzke formed the nonprofit production company Affinityfilms, Inc. Katzke is a graduate of the Radio-Television-Film School at the University of Texas, Austin, and completed her Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing and Directing in 1992 on scholarship at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Funders of her work have included the American Film Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alaska State Arts Council.

She has cited the work of American filmmaker and documentarian Frederick Wiseman as an important influence in her film making. One interviewer noted that, like in Wiseman's films, “Katzke’s films do not utilize voiceover narrations to highlight the story. Instead, she allows the subjects to tell their own stories through their actions and discourse with the camera.”

In numerous interviews, she has also referenced being influenced by life events, including her mother's death of breast cancer in 1983 at age 52, and her own diagnosis, less than a decade later, in 1992.

Themes in her work have included the following (with representative examples):

Exploring sexual assault and domestic violence in Alaska

No Word for Rape (1981) - A documentary addressing sexual assault in urban and rural Alaska. Won awards at film festivals in Seattle and Chicago, as well as at the first All-Alaska Film Festival.

Crescendo Director (1987) - A short addressing domestic violence, supported with a grant from the American Film Institute.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Sea of Oil (1990) Director - Documentary about the social and emotional impact of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. Screened at the Museum of Modern Art and was a 1991 Sundance Film Festival selection. Aired nationally on Season 4 of PBS' POV Showcase in July 1991. Received Silver Apple Award/National Educational Film and Video Festival.

Resilience

About Face: The Story of Gwendellin Bradshaw (2009); Director, Producer - Documentary about the struggles of a women facing the physical and mental repercussions of severe child abuse. Awarded Anchorage International Film Festival Best Snowdance award and 2010 award of excellence from The Accolade Competition, Feature Documentary category.

Speaking from the Heart (2015); Director, Producer - Powerful story of a man found as an abandoned child wandering the desert of Arizona.

Health

Alzheimer's

Backing Out of Time (2015); Director - Five families navigate caregiving for loved ones with Alzheimer's disease in Alaska, which has the fastest growing senior population in the United States.

Breast Cancer

Between Us: A First Aid Kit for Your Heart and Soul (1998) Director, Co-Producer - Documentary for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. "As a survivor, she wanted to direct a film that would help other victims get through the traumatic days or weeks between diagnosis and the first step of treatment.”)Funders included the Susan Komen Foundation; Zeneca (maker of tamoxifen, used in breast cancer treatment); and the Martin Lehrer Foundation. Shown at New York Women in Film & TV’s 20-year retrospective and the 1998 Breckenridge and Fort Lauderdale Festivals. Winner of an Independent Vision Award of $5,000 from Dockers.

Beyond Flowers: What to Say and Do When Someone You Know Has Breast Cancer- (2003)Funded by the Susan G. Komen Foundation -  "Best Health Media -- Long Form" by the Digital Video Awards Competition in Park City, Utah.

The Quiet War (2007) Director, Producer -  created as a resource for women facing metastatic breast cancer (1st place in its category at California's Reel Women International Film Festival March 2007).

Survive and Thrive (2010) Producer - A video resource for women facing a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment which features 11 long term survivors sharing what they wish they'd known during the initial crisis of diagnosis.

Other

Partners in Healing (2017) Director - An introduction to integrative medicine.

In a Nanosecond Director (2017) - Documentary addressing brain injury awareness.

Children / Growing Up

Inheritance (2006) Director, Producer - a short contrasting a child’s reactions to visiting Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Ground Zero in New York City

The Gift (2007) Director, Producer, Writer - a video short about spending an unplugged day in Alaska with grandparents.

World School: A Single Journey Can Change the Course of a Life (2013) Director - An Alaskan mother and her ten-year-old son sell everything to travel the world for a year.

Fourteen (2016) Director, Producer - Six Alaskan children are followed as they grown up from age 2 to 14.

Alaska Natives

Day in Our Bay: Voices & Views from Bristol Bay (2011) Director, Co-Producer - A compilation produced from dozens of crowdsourced personal videos showing one day in the life of the people of the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. All video was shot on October 15, 2011.

Homelessness

Fourth Avenue (1985) - About homelessness in the streets of Anchorage.

And Now We Rise (2019) Director, Producer - Biography of a young Athabascan hip-hop artist advocating to help displaced, homeless people in Alaska. “a portrait of an exceptional young activist, Samuel Johns,  motivated to help his Alaska Native community to lead sober, productive lives." [1]

In addition to her documentary work, Katzke has written a number of short stories, essays and feature film screenplays, and has been a periodic contributor of opinion pieces to the Anchorage Daily News.

Dancing for the Hunter

In 1988 she wrote a play, Dancing for the Hunter, based on the true-life stories of 17 women pursued and murdered by Alaskan serial killer (and former Anchorage baker) Robert Hansen. The project grew from interviews Katzke had begun while working on the documentary Fourth Avenue, when some of her subjects told her about a string of exotic dancers and who had recently disappeared "and how no one seemed to care.”Her script was drawn from audiotaped interviews she conducted with about 15 strippers during the year prior to Hansen's arrest.

Katzke told an interviewer her approach was influenced by having viewed a Broadway production of The Exonerated: “[S]he was particularly intrigued by the way actors-as-prisoners told their stories in monologue fashion, sitting on stools at the edge of a stage reading scripts perched on top of music stands.”

Dancing for the Hunter debuted at the 2005 Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, where it received notice, including a writeup in Backstage magazine, according to a blogger. Of a later reading in Anchorage, a critic wrote: “Her portraits of four lost souls who wander into the demimonde of strip clubs and prostitution have an authentic feel, as if they're backed up by hours and hours of interviews with dancers and call girls who lived through the Hansen era.”

Katzke twice optioned a 1988 movie script about the killings and used it as part of her application for graduate film school, but the production has never been made into a movie. "Serial killer stories were out of fashion,” she told the Anchorage Daily News in 2005. On a side note, Alaskan actor Ron Holmstrom has cited an early role in Katzke’s play as possibly having helped him attain a role in the 2013 Nicolas Cage film The Frozen Ground, a movie thriller also based on the Hansen story.

A Monkey's Tale

In 2015, Katzke also co-authored the book, A Monkey’s Tale: a Novel, with Thillman Wallace.

Two mentions of controversy have appeared in news coverage of Katzke's films:

Fourth Avenue, produced in 1985, examined the impacts of a downtown beautification project on Anchorage’s homeless. "We upset a number of people with that film," Katzke told an interviewer several years later. "The native people felt that by showing passed-out drunk native people we were racist, and we had slandered their culture in some way. The city officials felt that we had been unduly biased and sympathetic toward the native people. And so we got it from both sides, which made me think that we must have done a fair job."

Katzke's 1990 documentary Sea of Oil, which told about the human impact of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on the community of Valdez, Alaska, almost didn't make it out of the state, after Exxon wrote the mayor to warn the film would tarnish the community's reputation. This effort, however, failed to prevent the film from being seen more widely, and in July 1991, Sea of Oil was featured as part of a 2-hour nationwide PBS "POV Showcase" special on the environment.

Katzke's notable awards and honors have included:

Winner, 1996 Minnesota Blockbuster McKnight Film Fund Competition - one of four recipients who split prize money of $75,000.

Winner 1990 Tokuma Japan International Screenwriting Competition (for Pen Pals)

Nominated to the Athena Society (2005)

Rasmuson Fellowship (2004, 2018) - Katzke was one of the first recipients of the Rasmuson Foundation's Individual Artist awards in 2004. She was recognized again in 2018 with an $18,000 fellowship for her "multimedia storytelling project using environmental portrait photography, videos, social media and live presentations to document and share grassroots youth movements."

Governor's North Star Award for International Excellence in cultural exchange - Awarded to businesses and organizations that contribute significantly to Alaska’s trade, investment and international relations.

YWCA Alaska/BP 2018 Woman of Achievement

Alaska Literary Award 2017