Alumni Duo Sheds Light on Social Issues through Documentary

GOLDEN GATE XPRESS -- While filming the award-winning documentary “Peace Officer” in 2012, SF State alumni Scott Christopherson and Reeny McCauley did not realize the social issue they were highlighting would coincide with the Ferguson unrest that incited the nation. Christopherson, the director of the film, and McCauley, the film’s editor, met in the same class at SF State and both graduated with Master of Fine Arts degrees in Cinema. A year after graduation, the two worked together on a film that exposed the access of military weaponry to small-town police departments in the U.S. The film would go on to win awards at the South by Southwest Film Festival last month. “We hadn’t thought a whole lot about the militarization of police until this came up,” McCauley said. “But when I started working on (the film), the evidence that something was wrong and somebody needed to start talking about it was pretty clear to me.”