Director of Photography reel of OHO Media’s Torben Bernhard
Vimeo Staff Pick
Featured on Dazed as part of the Doc X Strand
Featured on The Atlantic
Featured on People Magazine
Featured on The New York Times
Featured on The Huffington Post
Winner of an Artistic Vision Award at BSDFF
Winner of 2014 Utah Short Film of the Year Award
Eri Hayward was born and raised in Utah as a boy. Her slow, painful journey to be recognized as a transgender woman lasted years. As she prepares for sex reassignment surgery, this short documentary explores her relationship with her family, her body, and her conservative Mormon upbringing. "Being LDS was our life," she says. "It's one of the reasons I didn't find out about what being trans was until I was an adult." Created in partnership with VideoWest.
Co-Edited by OHO Media
This special charts the rise of a cultural phenomenon that came to define a generation: MTV. What started during the nascent days of cable television as a scrappy, playful music video lineup, rapidly evolved into a reflection of American youth culture. As MTV came of age, the network pushed the boundaries of art, sex, gender and race, while cementing its image to celebrity. And when the information revolution raged, MTV was at the forefront exploring new technologies.
“I Want My MTV” weaves together exclusive interviews with the network’s founders and VJs, artists and journalists, along with rarely seen archival footage and outtakes, including an interview with the late David Bowie that was never broadcast on television. The documentary, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and became a crowd favorite at festivals around the world, details the story of a network that evokes youth for a generation now grown, and influenced the global media landscape for decades to come.
Interview subjects include Sting, Pat Benatar, Billy Idol, Annie Lennox, Nancy Wilson, Fab Five Freddy, Norman Lear, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, among many others.
Review in Variety
Featured on USA Today
Featured on Upworthy
Featured on Billboard
Featured at SXSW
Featured on The Huffington Post
100 MILLION VIEWS AND COUNTING!
The story of a mute teenager and his journey to record his first rap. Produced by Children's Miracle Network. For more information and to download the single, please visit oxygentofly.org. All proceeds go towards supporting children's hospitals.
OHO Media Roles: Editor, Director of Photography, and Color Services
Church & State is the improbable story of a brash, inexperienced gay activist and a tiny Salt Lake City law firm that joined forces to topple Utah’s gay marriage ban.
The film’s ride on the bumpy road to equality in Utah offers a glimpse at the Mormon church’s influence in state politics and the squabbles inside the gay community that nearly derailed a chance to make history.
Church & State is a story of triumph, setback and a little-known lawsuit that should have failed, but instead paved the way for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay unions nationwide.
Featured on The Atlantic
Featured on Narratively
For nearly 50 years, Ralphael Plescia has been making religious art to explore the story of creation in his private museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.
His project has one overriding vision: to tell the story of Biblical creation in the right way by restoring characters and tales lost to history. The sculptures and paintings are not within the rooms, but are a part of them. Underground tunnels have been hollowed out to make space for Hell and the Garden of Eden. Narrow pathways and bridges traverse groundwater bubbling up from below.
Plescia believes the building has a 98% of being bulldozed when he die, but that knowledge does not stop him from working every day to complete his life’s work.
OHO Media edited several packages for season one of Artful
Described by BYUtv as “a bold series about the inner workings of the creative spirit and how personal faith influences artists and their art. At the crossroads of truth and beauty, artists gain insights about the undeniable connection between instinct and divine influence, medium and message, creation and the Creator.”
Living off the grid in a northeast Thailand slum, Wichan Chaona collects recyclables from public trash bins to earn money for his family of seven. Shot from his motorcycle side cart, ‘Scavenger’ poetically weaves Wichan's daily routine with his observations about life and work, reminding us of the universal roots of human dignity and respect.
'Scavenger' premiered at the 2013 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Since its premiere, it has successfully screened at multiple venues and is currently included in Mountainfilm on Tour. To read the story behind this documentary, please visit this excellent article from Selective Echo.
A short documentary profiling "Stickz," a homeless man in Salt Lake City who aspires to rise out of his current circumstances by becoming a professional drummer. Coming soon.
Gilgal tells the story of brick mason Thomas Battersby Child, who upon retirement spent the final 19 years of his life creating a sculpture garden dedicated to Mormonism in his back yard. Coming soon.
Special Jury Citation for Best Short Documentary at SLIFF
Winner of the 2013 Utah Short Film of the Year Award
Winner of the 2013 Salt Lake City Weekly Arty for Best Short Film
In 1875, the Horn Silver Mine was discovered in the red rock cliffs of southwestern Utah. The town of Frisco was born and quickly became one of the most economically productive and notoriously violent towns in the Wild West. Boomtown blends found audio interviews of the town sheriff and other remaining inhabitants, recorded just before their deaths, with images of the decaying ghost town in 2011. Letting the community speak for itself, this film rediscovers the forgotten characters, stories, rumors, and legends of Frisco, Utah. Full documentary to be released online shortly.
In 1985, at two-months old, Dane Morgan Bernhard died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in a small town called Tarkio, Missouri. 25 years later, Torben Bernhard jumped in his car with an 8MM camera and drove from Utah to the Tarkio cemetery his brother was buried in to understand the tragedy that shook his family when he was two-years old. Using an audio interview recorded years earlier with his mother, Bernhard paints a poetic portrait of his family's loss and explores a child's perspective of death and mourning.
With stark black and white images of the crumbling town and cemetery, juxtaposed with the sincere account of a mother to her son, Tarkio Balloon captures the innocent hope of a child amidst the unpredictable harshness of reality.
The Sonosopherʼ is an experiential voyage into the peculiar life and art of Alex Caldiero. Tracing his birth and childhood in rural Sicily as well as his coming of age as a poet in New York City, Caldiero is found living in conservative Utah years after his conversion and separation from Mormonism. The film explores Caldieroʼs lifelong artistic investigation into ʻSonosophy,ʼ a unique hybrid of sound, poetry, and philosophy. Borrowing techniques from such diverse genres as avant-garde film and cinéma vérité, ʻThe Sonosopherʼ portrays Caldieroʼs life and work at its most traditional and most bizarre. Utilizing these diverse methods, the filmmakers artfully blend current performance and interview footage, 8MM family videos, and archival material to tell the intimate story of this largely unknown artist. To order a DVD and for more information, please visit the official film website.