Firehouse Filmmakers

By Etta Sanders

In 2003, 57 National Guardsmen from tiny Clarksville, Ark., got the letter they hoped would never come. They were being activated and sent to Iraq. From that first life-altering moment, filmmakers and Arkansas natives Craig and Brent Renaud were with the soldiers and their families, recording their fears and loneliness.

Alpert in DCTV's editing room. Photo: Carl Glassman

For a year and a half, as one brother followed the men and women through basic training and into sandstorms and ambushes in Iraq, the other filmed the families as they struggled to care for children and businesses back home.


The Renauds’ film, “Off to War,” which was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, juxtaposes the tragic reality of war on the battlefront and the homefront. “If there was a mortar attack and four people were killed, we were with the family members as they got word,” Craig Renaud said in an interview.


“Off to War,” was one of two documentaries in the film festival that had their start in an ornate former firehouse

with bright red doors on the corner of Lafayette and White Streets, the home of Downtown Community Television. Jon Alpert, DCTV’s founder, was the executive producer for both films.

Many New Yorkers would recognize Alpert’s face and distinctive voice from his decades of documentary work for NBC and later HBO in war zones from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But he is probably less well known as a pioneer Downtown resident who moved into a $75-a-month Canal Street loft in the early 1970’s. Back then he and his wife, Keiko Tsuno, shot videos out of a used post-office truck that they bought for $15.

“We’d show our tapes like street music,” he said. “That’s how we started in Lower Manhattan.”

In 1983 they moved the fledgling DCTV into the abandoned 1896 firehouse, which had no heat or hot water. Last year, when they completed a $1.2 million renovation of the landmark building, it was the first time in 20 years that the roof didn’t leak. Over those years, DCTV’s commercial work financed a growing video center, which Alpert describes as “really nonprofit.”

Craig and Brent Renaud spent over a year with a National Guard unit in Iraq and with the soldiers' families back home. "Our goal is to show through these soldiers' eyes what they were going through," said Craig. Photo: Downtown Community Television

When he is not hauling a camera to remote places, Alpert is at the firehouse, where he and Tsuno live with their daughter. He commutes in socks and sweats to a sunny top-floor office, accompanied by big Al, a hefty, tan Chesapeake Bay retriever. A camouflage helmet and flak jacket are flung in the corner. A polished brass fire pole runs through the middle of the room, although Alpert uses the stairs.

The 1896 firehouse that Jon Alpert and his DCTV call home. Photo: Carl Glassman

Downstairs are studios and editing rooms. A red fire truck cab sits outside one of the rooms waiting to be turned into a reception desk. A wide hallway is lined with a glass showcase displaying Alpert’s dozen Emmys and other awards won by DCTV films.

But DCTV does not produce only films; it produces filmmakers. DCTV offers more than 50 classes in video production, giving inexpensive access to cameras and editing equipment. A program called CONNECT TV trains filmmakers with disabilities. And 130 city high school students, most disadvantaged, are enrolled in the center’s PRO-TV classes for teenagers.

DCTV’s other Tribeca Film Festival entry, “Bullets in the Hood,” was made by two 19-year-old PRO-TV

graduates, Terrence Fisher and Daniel Howard. The documentary, about gun violence on their Brooklyn streets, won a prize at the Sundance festival.

“Brent and Craig covered the war over in the Middle East and Terrence and Danny covered the war here in Brooklyn,” said Alpert.

The Renauds, now in their 30s, came to DCTV as college interns, eventually learning to be editors, cameramen and producers. “Literally everything we learned with video and television was learned under Jon,” said Craig Renaud.

Last month, the brothers were back at the firehouse, having traded the dangers of war for the perils of parking tickets. They were editing thousands of hours of “Off to War” footage into 10 more television episodes.

Alpert was relieved to have them safely back home. “I was extraordinarily uncomfortable with this in the beginning because I didn’t like the idea of sending other people to dangerous places.”

Soon he would pack his own flak jacket for a return to Iraq to work on a film about the military medical corps and the difficult recoveries faced by wounded soldiers. After 30 years, Alpert is still going off to war. “I think it’s our responsibility to be the eyes and ears of the American people,” he said. “And it’s a privilege to be able to do that.”