A Filmmaker's Watershed Productions
David Eckert's New Pursuit Flows From His Environmental Concerns

By C. Woodrow Irvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 4, 2006

David Eckert is passionate about water.

"We are water," he says. "I'm between 70 and 95 percent of the water I drink. That's me. And what's in that water is me. It permeates every cell in my body. Every neuron. How I think, how I act, how I see, how I feel -- everything."

Eckert is passionate about a lot of things. His love of local history and culture led him to found the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation in Falls Church to honor the work of the city's African American civil rights pioneers. His love of trees has led him to serve on the city's Tree Commission for the past 17 years.

In recent years, though, he has been captivated by filmmaking, directing five documentaries about the dangers facing local watersheds. A partner, Mike Hamilton, handled the photography and helped with editing, and Eckert also served as writer and producer. Eckert calls the films "The Watershed Quintilogy."

His newest, "On the Edge -- The Potomac River Dyke Marsh," examines the plight of the last major tidal marshland within view of the capital. The marsh, just south of Alexandria off the George Washington Memorial Parkway, is home to hundreds of species of plants, birds and other animals, some seen nowhere else in the Washington area. But because of human activity, the marsh has been reduced to a fraction of the size it was a century ago.

Eckert, who maintains that, despite his success, he doesn't consider himself a filmmaker, is a native of New York. He was working in California in the 1980s -- an experience he now prefers to call, without elaboration, "my time in corporate America" -- when he became homesick for the East Coast. He said he seized an opportunity to transfer to an office job in Tysons Corner and moved with his wife and young daughter to Falls Church in 1988.

A few years ago, when he turned 50, Eckert and his wife, Annette Mills, were discussing the next chapter of their lives. He had an urge to do something different, and Mills agreed that it was time that he left his job to pursue other interests while she took a turn as the family's main breadwinner.

Eckert began filling his newfound free time by stepping up the volunteer activities that had always interested him. One of those pursuits led to the first film.

"It was my wife's idea," Eckert said. He and his family were helping clean up the ailing Four Mile Run, an urban stream that runs east from Falls Church to the Potomac at Reagan National Airport.

"I was . . . so frustrated with the fact that nothing was happening to help revive it," Eckert said. Mills, the environmental coordinator for the City of Falls Church, suggested that he use the skills he had picked up working on some public-access television shows and get the word out about the stream and its problems.

"I was supposed to take three months to make it," Eckert said. "It totally absorbed my life, because I didn't know anything about really making a film." It took 16 months to complete.

During the film's creation, Eckert said he "met a lot of people and galvanized a lot of support" for the stream's restoration.

"What surprised me was all I had to do was say 'I'm making a film about Four Mile Run,' " and suddenly, he said, people seemed very interested in the film, as well as the stream. "I started really realizing there is magic in this; real magic in making a film about something."

The movie, released in 2002, raised interest in the stream's health. Last month, a master plan for the restoration of Four Mile Run was adopted by Arlington County and the City of Alexandria, and officials credited Eckert's film with helping make it happen.

When he finished that project, Eckert had no idea that his filmmaking career was just getting started. "After that, I had no intention of making another film," Eckert said as he sat in the tidy kitchen of his modest Falls Church home one recent morning. "I was exhausted."

He had not counted on a demand for more. "The Northern Virginia Regional Commission came to me and asked if I would do a film on the Occoquan River," he said.

Eckert had mostly financed production of the first movie with limited support from, among others, the regional commission.

This was different. It was a project someone else wanted and would pay for.

"Now I was being asked to be a filmmaker . . . and that was very frightening," Eckert recalled. But the commission's executive director, G. Mark Gibb, "was a good salesman, and he talked me into it. He was so enamored of what happened to Four Mile Run because of the film. He wanted the same thing to happen to the Occoquan."

"Dave Eckert is incredible," Gibb said, adding that the commission has continued to encourage Eckert's work and to lend some financial support. "He puts a lot of his own time and effort into it. He has the passion for this. He is good at telling a story." Gibb said the commission routinely gets requests for copies of the Occoquan film.

In 2004, the City of Falls Church asked Eckert to make a movie about community tree planting and urban forestry. "I thought, 'That's just so boring,' " Eckert said. "I mean, I'm into tree planting -- I'm a tree commissioner -- but nobody cares about that. Not to see a film. And then they talked me into it, and I started saying, 'Okay, my challenge is to try to make this interesting.'

"One has to find the hook that will grab people immediately. That's the challenge: Where is that hook?" he said.

For "Laying Down Roots," he found it in history. Some U.S. communities have long traditions of improvement through reforestation, so he linked the idea of cultural roots with actual tree roots.

A well-received film about low-impact development followed, leading the Friends of Dyke Marsh, a volunteer group, to approach Eckert. Again, tired and unfamiliar with the subject, he wasn't sure it was a project he was ready to undertake.

"When I learned that the water from my house went there . . . and now is part of the problem that's destroying it, I said, 'Well, I have no choice,' " Eckert recalled.

"I think their intention was to have a beautiful movie, make people love the Dyke Marsh and that's it. That's a great thing, but that's not generally enough," he said.

It didn't take long to find the hook. The 5,000- to 7,000-year-old marsh has shrunk by more than 40 percent since dredging began there in the 1930s. Although those operations ended in the 1970s, Eckert said other potential threats -- such as storms and rising water levels from global warming and invasive plants introduced by humans -- make what is left vulnerable.

As Eckert and members of the volunteer group poked around the marsh one morning last month, it was obvious that Eckert had embraced it as whole-heartedly as he had the subjects of his other films.

Even in early spring, before the marsh had blossomed with the myriad colors of late spring and summer, he grew excited at signs of the still-thriving but threatened ecosystem.

Eckert radiates enthusiasm when he talks to audiences about the film, said Flo Stone, artistic director and founder of the Environmental Film Festival in the District. Each year the festival presents about 100 documentaries from nearly two dozen countries. Stone said that she has been impressed with Eckert's films and that they add a local element to the festival.

"We felt so lucky when he got hold of the festival five years ago," Stone said. "He is really focused on local issues that have relevance elsewhere." More than 400 people were at the marsh film's debut at the Kennedy Center in March, Stone said.

Since he completed "On the Edge," Eckert has busied himself with another film-related project. He created the Falls Church Film Festival, which featured the Dyke Marsh film and five other short documentaries from filmmakers who live in the 2.2-square-mile city. The movies were screened at the State Theatre last month, and Eckert said people have already been asking him to put on the festival again next year.

Whether a new film of his own will be among the offerings remains to be seen. But if the past is any indication, the demand for his work won't disappear.

"I'm very concerned with our ability to sustain ourselves; for the human race to sustain itself," he said. "And there are so many different aspects. Whether it's the environmental aspects that sustain us or the cultural aspects that sustain us -- I have a deep interest in that. To make films is really just a medium I happen to work in."