OTL PRESS NIGHT SCHEDULED

January 29, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Filmmakers David Bettencourt and G. Wayne Miller invite you to a press screening of ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place, a feature-length documentary movie about the tuberculosis epidemic in America in the 1900s and globally today that will be nationally broadcast on PBS.

The press night will be held at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 10, at the Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main Street, Providence, R.I. Bettencourt, Miller and members of the cast and crew will be on hand to answer questions.

ON THE LAKE will have its world premiere on Feb. 13 at the Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket, R.I., and will be broadcast on Rhode Island PBS (WSBE-channel 36) at 8 p.m. on March 25 (and other dates). The film has just been accepted for national distribution by NETA (National Educational Telecommunications Association).

ON THE LAKE had three successful test screenings last fall: in Pittsburgh, at Harvard College, and at state-run Zambarano Hospital in Pascoag, R.I., where much of the film is set. Zambarano opened in 1905 as a tuberculosis sanatorium.

Production of ON THE LAKE began in late 2007 at Zambarano, and later took filmmakers to Colorado, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York. The final version has images and reports from overseas. Globally, tuberculosis is the number-two infectious disease killer, after HIV/AIDS.

Even before its release, ON THE LAKE has garnered honors. The film is a member of the Geneva, Switzerland-based worldwide Stop TB Partnership (www.stoptb.org), run by an executive committee that includes members of the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The film had also been endorsed by the globe’s most prominent fight-TB advocate, Harvard’s Dr. Paul Farmer, subject of Pulitzer prize-winning author Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer said:

“Tuberculosis -- one of humankind's oldest documented illnesses -- has been placed, by some, in the category of 'emerging infectious diseases.' The truth is, TB has never gone away. It has been and remains one of the world's leading infectious killers… I applaud the efforts of Eagle Peak Media and their film 'On The Lake' to tell the human story of the tuberculosis epidemic.”

ON THE LAKE is the first production from Eagle Peak Media, a multi-media company founded in May by Bettencourt, the award-winning director of YOU MUST BE THIS TALL: The Story of Rocky Point Park, and Miller, Providence Journal staff writer and author of seven books. More Eagle Peak documentaries are in pre-production.