Halsey Institute shows Award-winning documentary

Having screened in more than 100 film festivals on five continents, capturing 40 awards in the process, producer-director Adrian Belic's the documentary "Beyond the Call" is a chronicle of adventure with a purpose.

It is the story of Ed Artis, James Laws and Walt Ratterman, three middle-aged men who transport desperately needed food and medicine into some of the world's most imposing places, including the front lines of war zones.

On Friday, the College of Charleston's Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Center for The Documentary offer a special showing of the film, accompanied by an appearance by Belic, as part of the Southern Arts Federation's Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers. The screening is scheduled for 8 p.m. Friday in Room 309 of the Simons Center for the Arts.

Belic will engage the audience in a discussion after the film, followed by a reception with the filmmaker. The events are free and open to the public.

Hewing to the maxim "High Adventure and Service to Humanity," this trio of benefactors is shown providing humanitarian aid in places that many other organizations consider too forbidding or too dangerous.

Belic characterizes his documentary as an "Indiana Jones meets Mother Teresa" tale.

"It took three years to film, during which I was on call, at a moment's notice, 24/7 to go to some far-flung corner of the world. The editing took another 18 months, and we've spent more than a year now traveling with the film to different parts of the world."

The documentary has won the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival Audience Award, the Telluride Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, the Palm Springs International Film Festival Best of Festival Award, the Santa Fe Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, and the Taos Film Festival Human Rights Award, among others.

Belic and his brother, Roko, partners in Wadi Rum Productions, are best known for their Academy Award-nominated "Genghis Blues," a Sundance Film Festival hit. Adrian Belic, a Chicago native, is a graduate of the University of Southern California and former director of an environmental information center in Los Angeles.

He says serendipity played a hand in the genesis of the new documentary.

"I actually met Ed Artis, a retired mortgage banker and Vietnam vet, at a screening in California of my previous film, 'Genghis Blues.' I did a Q&A after the movie and Ed came up and told me some crazy stories about himself, his two buddies and the places they'd been. I thought to myself, 'If half of what this guy is saying is true, I'm interested.' A few months later ,my brother and I sat down with him for a six-hour interview, and, frankly, didn't believe he was telling us the whole truth — until James Laws, the cardiologist, called me the next morning to say it was all true. He had the same stories."

Ratterman, the third member of the group, was a journeyman electrician who turned a small electrical contracting business into a multimillion dollar firm before selling his interest and taking up humanitarian work full time. The three men are still active, most recently having brought aid to people in the southern Philippines, Burma and Rwanda.

"Jim Laws just turned 70 this year, and Ed has been doing this outside the envelope, under the radar ever since he was serving in Vietnam as a paratrooper medic. He saw the suffering in countries like Laos and would talk to humanitarian organizations about helping. Their hands were tied, but not his." The annual Southern Circuit Tour is a program of the Southern Arts Federation, a nonprofit regional arts organization established in 1975. The Federation is supported by funding and programming partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts and the state arts agencies of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

For more information on the Southern Arts Federation and its programs, visit www.southarts.org.

For more information, contact the Halsey Institute at 843-953-5680 or visit www.halsey.cofc.edu.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier.com or 937-5707.