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Fair Oceanside filmmakers debuts first documentary
Everything that Oceanside native Erica Scharf remembers learning about Native Americans in school took the form of history lessons — where Indians used to live and what they used to do.
There were no Native American students at Oceanside High School with her, and no native communities nearby. That sparked her curiosity, and made her wonder what Native American communities were like today.
So, in 2008, Scharf, 29, a graduate of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, created a documentary called “Up Heartbreak Hill,” about a modern Native American population in the Four Corners area of the West, which will premiere on PBS on July 29 as part of the network’s “POV” documentary series.
“The film is about three high school seniors on the Navajo Nation,” Scharf said. “I followed their senior year, as they decided if they were going to stay on the reservation or leave, and what the implications of that decision would be for their families, for their community, and the pros and cons of staying versus leaving.”
The Navajo Nation reservation occupies parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Scharf filmed her documentary in the town of Navajo, N.M., among others, and the project took nearly four years. She began by reaching out to schools on the reservation in early 2008 to see if there was any interest on the part of the Indians in participating in the project. The response, she said, was surprisingly positive.
“So I made a scouting trip in April of 2008 to the Navajo Nation,” Scharf said. “I think I wound up visiting four or five different communities, and just spent some time with students at each of those schools.”
The first community she visited was Navajo. Scharf loved the area so much that, even though it wasn’t part of her plan, she returned and spent a few more days there after she visited other communities.
When she returned to New York after her first trip to the reservation, she used the 15 hours or so of footage she shot to put together a fundraising trailer. In August 2008 she returned to Navajo, and she spent a total of six months filming, at the start and the end of the 2008-09 school year.
