Laura Paglin films in the news...
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documentary
By David Lamble
The Bay Area Reporter
Excerpt: "Unseen" - Laura Paglin presents a real-life horror story that will stay with you. Unfolding in a Cleveland, Ohio hood that appears to have been ground central for the crack cocaine epidemic, the story features a villain right out of central casting, a drug-dealer/pimp who lures 11 African American women to a house in a slum where he tortures and murders them...
By Steve Kopian
UNSEEN FILMS
Anthony Sowell was convicted of the rape of Melvette Sockwell in 1989 and went to jail for 15 years. In 2009 the bodies of 11 people were discovered in and around his home in the Cleveland neighborhood of Mt Pleasant. The women had disappeared over a three year period, however the police never investigated the cases of the missing women until the bodies turned up...
By Carlo Wolff | Staff Reporter
Cleveland Jewish News
Cleveland Heights filmmaker Laura Paglin goes deep and disturbing in “Unseen,” her powerful documentary about Anthony Sowell. Interweaving interviews with survivors of the Mount Pleasant killer and archival and contemporary footage, she paints a harrowing picture of a Cleveland neighborhood that poverty has rotted to the core...
By Andrea Simakis
The Plain Dealer
Ironically, the most memorable moments in "Unseen," a documentary about the Anthony Sowell killings, aren't the lurid details of his unspeakable crimes. In 2009, police uncovered 11 bodies in and around Sowell's property at 12205 Imperial Ave. in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood.
It's the stuff of horror movies to be sure. But that doesn't compare to the riveting, direct testimony of women who made it out alive - among them Vanessa Gay, who staggered, limping and bloody, out onto Imperial Avenue one Sunday morning...
By Andrea Simakis
The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - In the documentary "Unseen," directed by Laura Paglin, the title emerges from wisps of smoke - no doubt, we are to imagine, from a crack pipe.
Crack cocaine, after all, was the drug that swept through the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where serial killer and rapist Anthony Sowell hunted for his victims, laying waste to whole families.
"It was like Hurricane Katrina," says Vanessa Gay to Paglin's camera. She's one of the few women who met the ex-Marine and lived.
"It came though and ravaged my whole life."
As Gay tells it, it was her addiction to that drug that brought her to Sowell's door at 12205 Imperial Ave., a bland white duplex that no one realized was the source of the sickening stench that dominated the area for years, baffling health inspectors and residents alike...
By Tiffiny Kaye Whitney
L.A. Splash Magazine
At 7:15 AM on November 2, 2004, lines for the national election are already long and full of people waiting to have a say on who the next president of the United States should be. Though the wishes of swing-state Ohio have come to fruition in the form of a heavily campaigned high voter turnout, reality sets in. The election board apparently hasn't planned appropriately for the explosive expansion of citizens eager to perform their civic duty...