Oscar®-qualifying Documentary Eco-Hack! Thrills and Educates Audiences

Brett Marty and Josh Izenberg’s OSCAR® film Eco-Hack! thrills and it educates audiences in a wild, high-tech battle for an ecosystem

Los Angeles, CA (Oct. 17, 2023). Co-directed by Brett Marty and Josh Izenburg, Eco-Hack! follows Tim Shields down an unconventional route to save the Desert Tortoise. Eco-Hack! is educating and entertaining. We watch Tim turn away from traditional conservation biology. He tackles the ballooning Raven population brought on by increased human activity. Eco-Hack! is in qualification and consideration for a 2024 Academy® Award. After winning Best Documentary Short at the Palm Springs International ShortFest, and HotDocs International in Toronto.

Logline: An unconventional field biologist wages a high-tech war against ravens in the Mojave. Think laser cannons, exploding tortoises, autonomous drones. In a last-ditch effort to save the last of the desert tortoise from extinction.

Josh Izenberg is a documentary filmmaker based in the California Bay Area. His film, Slomo (2013), won over a dozen awards. This including best short documentary at SXSW, premiered as a New York Times Op-Doc. It is on the shortlist for an Academy Award. His subsequent film, the Netflix Original, Resurface, won the Jury Prize at Tribeca and was nominated for an Emmy.

The Official Trailer for ECO-HACK! Directed by Brett Marty & Josh Izenberg

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He’s since co-directed the short documentaries Game Hawker (2022) for Patagonia Films and Eco-Hack!. Which won audience awards at HotDocs and Palm Springs, and premiered with The New Yorker in July 2023.

Brett Marty cut his teeth as a commercial director. And made the transition to filmmaking with a handful of documentary and narrative shorts. Which have won their share of jury awards and played at 100+ film festivals. Including Cannes, and is on commission by The New Yorker, Patagonia Films, and National Geographic.

In previous lives, he studied sculpture at UC Berkeley. He drove an old Buick from San Francisco to Argentina, and helped Nate Silver launch FiveThirtyEight in 2008.

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Tim Shields has some four decades of experience out in the field as a biologist. Logging some 25,000 miles on foot, surveying, and making critical observations. Those observations of avian predation of the Mojave’s desert tortoise led to his founding of Hardshell Labs. And a slew of inventions, innovations, and techniques for protecting endangered species around the world.

He is also the winner of the prestigious Roosevelt Genius Prize and grants from the National Science Foundation.

Eco-Hack! is in qualification and consideration for a 2024 Academy® Award.

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