Shad Run was produced by Ben Dorger and Becky Harlan.
Ben Dorger is a filmmaker, photographer and journalist based in Ogden, Utah. He is currently a multimedia journalist at the Standard-Examiner newspaper in Northern Utah. Ben graduated with a master’s in New Media Photojournalism from the Corcoran College of Art + Design and has a BFA in Media Art from the University of Tennessee. Before moving to Utah, Ben started his career in Washington, D.C. He was the Senior Editor at Stone Soup Films and has interned for the video teams at USA Today and The Washington Post. He has had multiple independent short documentary films screen in several film festivals.
Becky Harlan is a video producer and photographer based on a house barge in the District of Columbia’s Washington Channel. She has been obsessed with documenting Washington’s waterways since 2012. Currently, she works on the video team at NPR. Before that, she was a photo editor and writer for National Geographic’s photography blog. She earned her master’s in New Media Photojournalism from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2013, and she has a BA in Art History from Furman University.
American shad were once so abundant in the Potomac River, that in their heyday, people said the river would “run silver” each spring when they returned to spawn. The anadromous fish is native to the coastal rivers of the eastern United States, including the Potomac, and they were a favorite catch for George Washington in his Mount Vernon fisheries.
By the 1970s, this was no longer the case. Shad numbers were so low that even the most seasoned anglers went home from a day on the river empty-handed. Overfishing, pollution, and a loss of habitat brought on by the construction of dams, threatened American shad not only in the Potomac but all over the east coast.
Were it not for the vision and hard work of a small, dedicated group of biologists, fishermen, and school children, American shad might have disappeared from our nation’s capital forever. This short documentary film chronicles the abundance, demise, and triumphant return of a native fish, highlighting the citizens who refused to let them fade away and those who are still united by the quest to fish the Potomac’s renowned shad run.
Shad Run is an official selection in D.C. Shorts and the Chesapeake Film Festival . Screening dates and locations will be posted when the film festivals release their schedules, so stay …
NPR’s Skunk Bear blog discussed our coverage of American shad while the film was still in production.
