Dan Koehler '12 helps produce documentary that wins top award at Tribeca Film Festival

Elon alumnus Dan Koehler ’12 was part of the production team for “Point and Shoot,” a 88-minute documentary film that won best documentary at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Directed by two-time Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry, the documentary follows Matt VanDyke, a Baltimore man who goes on a three-year, 35,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East. He befriends and joins Libyan rebels along the way and films himself through much of his adventures, including a six-month stint in solitary confinement.

Koehler works at Marshall Curry Productions in Brooklyn, N.Y., and served on the film as assistant producer, assistant editor and story consultant. In 2012, he directed, edited and shot “Win or Lose,” a short documentary by Elon University School of Communications that was screened at different film festivals last year, including the Seattle International Film Festival. As an undergraduate student, Koehler was a member of elondocs, Elon’s documentary production program.

The official synopsis of “Point and Shoot” reads:

In 2006, Matt VanDyke, a timid 27-year-old with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, left home in Baltimore and set off on a self-described “crash course in manhood”.  He bought a motorcycle and a video camera and began a three-year, 35,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East.

While traveling, he struck up an unlikely friendship with a Libyan hippie, and when revolution broke out in Libya, Matt joined his friend in the fight against dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other, Matt fought in—and filmed—the war until he was captured by Gaddafi forces and held in solitary confinement for six months. Two-time Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry tells this harrowing and sometimes humorous story of a young man’s struggle for political revolution and personal transformation.