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PODCAST

Doc Walks

Ben Steinbauer & Keith Maitland

Documentary filmmakers, Keith Maitland (TOWER, DEAR MR BRODY) and Ben Steinbauer (WINNEBAGO MAN, CHOP & STEELE), host this lively walk & talk podcast featuring conversations with today"s best non-fiction storytellers. DocWalks takes the conversation to the street (or nature trail), offering candid insight into the art & industry of documentary filmmaking for an audience of emerging filmmakers and doc-lovers alike.

tv & film film interviews

All Episodes

01:12:46

EP072 - Not Since Walt Disney… w/ Geeta Gandbhir

Doc Walks ·

2026/10/01

It's a rainy day in Brooklyn, but it sure felt like the sun was shining—guess that's just the effect that Geeta Gandbhir has on those around her! Geeta is having a big year—she just became the first director ever nominated for both documentary feature and a documentary short Oscars in the same year… the first woman, and woman of color with two same year directing noms, challenging the long-standing status of Walt Disney who pulled that feat off in the animated categories decades ago. But we're

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01:01:02

EP071 - Mediation Required w/ Andrew & Melissa Shea

Doc Walks ·

2026/09/24

We hit the trail with Austin's own husband-and-wife filmmaking duo, Andrew and Melissa Shea. They've been married for nearly 30 years, partnered on every film they've ever made, and, according to Ben, may be the first couple to pull that off. Andrew's road to filmmaking was wonderfully circuitous. He started as a New York theater kid, passed the bar in two states, ran a regional theater in Santa Fe for eight seasons, and enrolled at USC film school in his 30s. That's where he met Melissa on day one

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48:28

EP070 - Don't Go Chasing the Truth w/ Jannike Åhlund

Doc Walks ·

2026/09/17

Welcome to the first-ever Doc Walks International! Keith treks to Sweden, to the tiny Baltic island of Fårö, where INGMAR BERGMAN built his creative base. Keith's there shooting for his new documentary, BERGMAN IN DALLAS, about the filmmaker's forgotten 1981 visit to Texas — enjoying an artist's residency at the Bergman Estate. And this journey into the world of Ingmar Bergman brought Keith to this week's guest, Jannike Åhlund, founder of the Bergman Week festival and chairperson of the Bergman

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45:28

EP069 - GOOD COP, BAD COP w/ Sam Wainwright Douglas &...

Doc Walks ·

2026/09/10

We walk Hyde Park with longtime friends Sam Wainwright Douglas and David Hartstein — the co-directing team behind Blue Suitcase — and it is not a short story. Turns out it started at Slamdance 2006: David was editing ALONG CAME KINKY: TEXAS JEWBOY FOR GOVERNOR and needed an editor who actually knew Texas; Sam had THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS: BOUND TO LOSE playing the same festival. One carpetbagger recognizing another, basically. Before teaming up, David quietly built a run as a go-to producer — THE

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01:07:00

EP068 - You Must Be Weird Guys w/ Chris Metzler

Doc Walks ·

2026/09/03

Keith goes coastal this week, walking the foggy cliffs of Point Lobos, California with Bay Area filmmaker Chris Metzler—co-director of PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: THE STORY OF FISHBONE and RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE. Chris and Keith go back to 2008, when they met at the PBS Producers Academy at WGBH, and their cohort reads like a Sundance roll call: S. Leo Chiang, Su Kim, Christine Turner and more. We dig into how a kid from Independence, Missouri who "hated

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01:08:55

EP067 - Flip On the Porch Light w/ Margaret Brown

Doc Walks ·

2026/08/27

We walk with Margaret Brown, director of BE HERE TO LOVE ME, THE ORDER OF MYTHS, THE GREAT INVISIBLE, DESCENDANT, and THE YOGURT SHOP MURDERS, and winner of Peabody, Independent Spirit, SXSW and Sundance awards. She brings along Max Pickle, her nine-year-old wire-haired dachshund, who sets the pace: shade, water, and a hard stop whenever he's done. Margaret's deep in publicity mode on THE YOGURT SHOP MURDERS, her HBO series about the 1991 killing of four teenage girls in North Austin. The series

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01:04:39

EP066 - Tale as Old as Time w/ Gene Gallerano

Doc Walks ·

2026/08/20

Keith walks Hyde Park—with a detour into & across the Hancock Golf Course—with LA's Gene Gallerano. An East Dallas kid raised on the humanities and Poor David's Pub, Gene's an actor-turned-producer-turned-Emmy-winning director, fresh off multiple wins at the Waco FF for THANK YOU FOR LISTENING, his Texas Monthly short about country singer Joshua Ray Walker. The origin story is a rom-com: Gene boards a flight, spots Joshua Ray, and talks to him for seven hours straight—true love at 30,000 feet

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01:11:06

EP065 - I Don't Get Served My Own Movies w/ Penny Lane

Doc Walks ·

2026/08/13

We were supposed to be in Central Park. We are not. It's raining so we're in Penny Lane's apartment, shoes off, with a cat named Luna auditioning for the role of "the action," and Flaco the Owl on the TV behind us. So much for a walking show. Penny's deep in what she calls PR season for WILD INSIDE, her new HBO doc about the Eurasian eagle-owl who broke out of the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and spent a year as the most photographed bird in New York. Then she tells us she barely shot it. A volunteer

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01:01:50

EP064 - You Don't Need a Restaurant to Eat w/ David Liu

Doc Walks ·

2026/08/06

Ben walks the lake at Mueller with David Liu—director, editor, producer, composer, and until 2024, an AI engineer. Fifteen-plus years in hardware, software, product design and machine learning, and then generative AI showed up and he decided he didn't want his name on where it was going. So he went looking for the one medium the technology can't enter without destroying it… documentary filmmaking. Here's the crazy part - he never wanted to be a filmmaker. He wanted to score films. A friend pointed

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01:05:20

EP063 - The Edge of Psychosis w/ Hisko Hulsing

Doc Walks ·

2026/07/30

When Hisko Hulsing is in town, you grab your camera & mic, and hit the trail, ready to court controversy with the best oil-painting animator this side of the Netherlands. Hisko is the wild artist that doc-maker Brett Morgen trusted to paint the inside of Kurt Cobain's head for MONTAGE OF HECK. He's a director who's marshalled the talents of dozens of artists over multiple years to bring HARRY RENTS A ROOM (1999), SEVENTEEN (2003), and JUNKYARD (2012) to life. He's known for his uniform black shirts,

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01:12:26

EP062: Back To The Root w/ David Alvarado

Doc Walks ·

2026/07/23

Spark up a big cigar with Ben and filmmaker David Alvarado in honor of Luis Valdez, the central figure in Alvarado's new film AMERICAN PACHUCO (playing Austin's Cine Las Américas). A Dallas kid turned Brooklyn doc-maker, David found his calling twice: once when LA BAMBA (1987) showed him a Chicano family reaching the American dream, and again when a college cinéma-vérité class screened A TIME FOR BURNING (1966), which blew the medium wide open for him. We trace the whole arc—from a high-school

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01:01:05

EP061 - Log Off and Hang Out w/ Lauren Hough

Doc Walks ·

2026/07/16

We walk Austin's Boggy Creek Trail with acclaimed memoirist Lauren Hough — from a childhood spent in a cult to Air Force vet to ex-cable technician; and now, she's the writer whose viral essay about fixing people's cable got read 8 million times in a single weekend. Lauren's backstory is so enormous it usually eats a whole interview: she grew up in the Children of God, got run out of the military under Don't Ask Don't Tell (they torched her car), flipped a coin between Atlanta and DC, and told dumb

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01:05:57

EP060 - Angels Watching Over Me w/ Ya'Ke Smith

Doc Walks ·

2026/07/09

Take a spirited walk though East Austin, Black History, and the Texas State Cemetery with filmmaker, educator, and self-described activist-artist Ya'Ke Smith—on Juneteenth week, no less. We kick off our walk under a Moonlight Tower and basically never stop moving: past Franklin Barbecue (pour one out for the old Ben's Barbecue), over to the Victory Grill, and into a cash-deal for some Bass Reeves-inspired street art. Ya'Ke walks Keith through CYCLES OF RESILIENCE, his new doc chasing a Juneteenth

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41:27

EP059 - Don't Listen to Me About Anything w/ Isaac Gale

Doc Walks ·

2026/06/25

We hit the streets of South by Southwest with Isaac Gale—director, artist, and one-half of the Minneapolis noise outfit Marijuana Deathsquads, in town to play the fest with his band. Isaac's the kind of guy who'd rather break a piece of software than master it, and that restless, try-anything energy runs through everything he makes. We wind through Ben's old neighborhood and retrace how the two first met—around WINNEBAGO MAN, which Isaac's partner JoLynn Garnes cut an early version of—then dig into

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01:11:13

EP058 - The Jellyfish Died w/ Juli Berwald

Doc Walks ·

2026/06/18

Meet Juli Berwald—a marine biologist turned science writer and the author of an invertebrate page-turner—she's the founder of a coral-reef nonprofit in Honduras, aaaaand she's producing her first doc. Throughout our waterfront walk at Ladybird Lake Juli opens up about her adventures in science writing—how getting fired off a book project (& replaced by Elizabeth Kolbert) inspired Juli to create her own destiny and finally write her own book. What follows is a masterclass in turning science into

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01:07:53

EP057 - Don't Make a Documentary (It'll Ruin Your...

Doc Walks ·

2026/06/11

We hit the boardwalk with Luke Korem—the Emmy-winning documentary director behind DEALT, MILLI VANILLI, and ACTION—and somewhere between a guy blasting EDM off a portable speaker and the bats under the bridge, Luke hands us a filmmaking philosophy worth bottling: it's all the same muscle. Doc, series, scripted—storytelling is storytelling, and the trick is knowing a series is a sprint and a feature is a marathon. Luke walks us through the whole arc: his accidental first feature LORD MONTAGU (a

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48:30

EP056 - Walk to the Next Block w/ Barlow Jacobs

Doc Walks ·

2026/06/04

Barlow Jacobs says: Walk to the Next Block.. easy to say when you're sitting there, not-walking on DocWalks. It's day three of the AFS Doc Intensive, and we close out our run in the room for a sit-down with actor-turned-documentarian Barlow Jacobs—a guy we've been hearing about for 20 years ever since he burst out of Sundance with LOW AND BEHOLD in 2007. Barlow brings his doc-debut, THE VOYAGE OUT to Austin for Doc Days. Shot on 16mm, fully off-grid, on a nine-day elk hunt deep in the mountains—the

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51:46

EP055 - Chief Emotions Officer w/ Alisa Payne

Doc Walks ·

2026/05/28

Alisa Payne cannot be stopped… certainly not by a little rain. When the downpour chases us indoors, we're lucky enough to post up in a cozy podcast studio at Austin Public—the public-access station where, Alex Jones got his start—and the home to the Austin Film Society Documentary Intensive, where the Oscar-nominated producer is serving as a mentor. You may know Alisa as the producer behind Geeta Gandbhir's body-cam-footage based, 'Stand Your Ground' Netflix doc THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR. But it's just

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01:10:08

EP054 - Stories Are Everywhere w/ Pete Muller

Doc Walks ·

2026/05/21

We duck inside for the first time ever — into the Blanton Museum of Art, because it's pouring in Austin and Pete Muller had the brilliant idea to bring our show into a gallery. Pete is the National Geographic photographer behind BUCKS HARBOR, his five-years-in-the-making debut feature about lobster fishermen in Downeast Maine, premiering at Berlinale and playing Doc Days at the Austin Film Society. We wander past Jacob Lawrence and Andrew Wyeth and Jerry Bywaters' OIL FIELD GIRLS while Pete walks

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56:30

EP053 - I'm No Good on My Own w/ Bradley Jackson

Doc Walks ·

2026/05/14

Ben walks Glassell Park in L.A. with Bradley Jackson—screenwriter, novelist, and the documentary writer/producer behind FACING NOLAN, DEALT, MILLI VANILLI, and the Showtime sports-betting docuseries ACTION. Bradley leads Ben up his neighborhood hill as he details exactly how he ended up in a "premium economy" English castle filming a bisexual British aristocrat for his very first doc—and why he never left doc-making behind. Bradley lays out his role as creative-producer in his partnerships with

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