Shaun Kadlec
Hello. Shaun here. So, I’m a California native from a quirky mountain town called Frazier Park. I went off to Carleton College in Minnesota where I did a degree in musicology with an emphasis on the history and theory of twentieth-century experimental music. Right. Because of the vibrant job market in that field. But I loved it, and I also did a lot of writing and literary study at the same time. I ended up in Sri Lanka a couple of years after graduation on a one-year Fulbright Fellowship to study Sri Lanka’s literature of conflict. I came back to the states after that and sort of wandered for a while, working in a wine store, as an assistant to a philanthropist, as a personal chef for a family of fabulous vegan anarchists.
After the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I helped put together a research project looking at how international aid money was being used in Sri Lanka. That took me back to Sri Lanka for another year, and that’s where I made my first film. It was a guerilla-style film education, running around an island at war with a tiny MiniDV camera and a terrible microphone, shooting a documentary about the murder of a prominent Sri Lankan journalist. It turns out that if one was respectful and somewhat careful about the questions one asked, the Tamil Tigers were extremely gracious hosts.
I was pretty hooked on filmmaking, so I came to Los Angeles after that to learn more about it. I took some classes and spent a lot of time working on whatever projects would take me. Assistant Director for an erotic “art-film” that was suspiciously devoid of narrative? Check. And now filmmaking is what I do. Directing and shooting are my favorite crafts, but I also produce and edit. I’ve continued to do a lot of international work (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mexico). I’ve also done some fun scripted commercials, some serious advocacy pieces, some pure documentary that has won awards at film festivals. There are so many ways to tell stories.