Chris Metzler

After graduating from USC with a degree in business and cinema, Chris Metzler's film career has taken him from the depths of agency work, to coordinating post-production for awful American movies seen late at night in Belgium. His filmmaking work has resulted in him criss-crossing the country with the aid of caffeinated beverages, all the while making his way in the Nashville country and Christian music video industries, before finally forsaking his soul to commercial LA rock n' roll. These misadventures culminated in him winning a Billboard Magazine Music Video Award. He eventually joined the independent documentary film scene and started work on his feature length directorial debut - the offbeat environmental documentary, "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea", which was narrated by legendary counterculture filmmaker and "King of Trash" John Waters. The film went on to win over 37 awards for Best Documentary and was named by Booklist as one its Top 10 Environmental Films. A cult favorite, the film was released theatrically in the United States and broadcast nationally on the Sundance Channel and public television's America ReFramed. With the success of that film, he has gone on to pursue other sub-cultural documentary subjects, including: rogue economists, lucha libre wrestlers, ganja-preneurs, and evangelical Christian surfers. Additional feature documentaries include the Emmy nominated documentary "Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone" about the legendary Black ska-punk band which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, screened at SXSW, and aired nationally on PBS and Starz. And the ITVS co-production "Rodents of Unusual Size" about the giant swamp rat invasion of Louisiana which aired on PBS' Independent Lens. He also frequently serves as a producer/director for a wide variety of documentary, commercial, corporate, and music video projects, including directing numerous documentaries for KCET's Artbound, including the Emmy nominated hour long doc "The State of Creativity" and "Heath Ceramics: The Making of a California Classic".