About Us
Outlier Films, LLC is a video production company specializing in documentaries and non-fiction storytelling for public television, education, and web distribution. We craft films from beginning to end, from research and scriptwriting through shooting, editing and delivery.
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Erika Trautman
Producer & Editor Erika Trautman’s work has aired on ABC, NBC, CBS, cable and PBS, as well as a variety of film festivals. Most recently, she edited and field-produced an hour-long documentary for MSNBC on the sex-trafficking of foreign-born women and girls inside the United States. Animal and environmental documentaries hold particular importance to Trautman. She produced the half-hour film How to Kill a Fish about the invasive northern pike in a California lake, the threat they posed to the native fish populations and the darkly absurd consequences of the state’s efforts to eradicate them. She also field-produced and edited a news magazine piece for CNBC’s Business Nation about a proposed water bottling facility in rural California that would threaten local fisheries. And she edits the Jean Michel Cousteau Ocean Adventures web videos for the PBS website.
Trautman’s other recent editing work includes films for public television on Afghanistan about the resurgence of the opium trade and the lives of women post-Taliban, and the half-hour film for PBS, Granny D Goes to Washington. Trautman was also an associate producer on the Emmy-nominated FRONTLINE, Chasing the Sleeper Cell, which took a critical look at FBI/CIA collaboration in the wake of 9/11, the documentary version of Michael Pollan’s acclaimed book The Botany of Desire and a NOVA hour about fractal geometry with award winning filmmakers Bill Jersey and Michael Schwarz. Trautman is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and Yale University.
Contact: erikatrautman(at)gmail(dot)com
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Monica Lam
Producer & Cinematographer Monica Lam has covered politics, religion, international stories, and performing arts. Lam speaks several languages, including Chinese, Spanish, and German, and has worked on most of the continents in the world. She has produced several international reports for the PBS series FRONTLINE/World, including Paraguay: Sounds of Hope, about a social entrepreneur’s effort to transform the lives of poor children in Paraguay through music. Her most recent story for FRONTLINE/World, A Message from the Sea, took her to the Faroe Islands to examine how new research on mercury contamination is affecting the centuries-old whale hunting tradition there. Lam has worked to document the lives of young sweatshop workers in southern China for China Blue, worked as a line producer on Bolinao 52, a documentary about Vietnamese boat people, and explored the aftermath of apartheid in the tragic, Academy Award nominated story of a young South African photographer.
Closer to home, Lam has covered the politics of global warming for FRONTLINE, documented the work of teachers for California’s public school system, examined the American juvenile justice system for PBS, and followed the horrors of the trafficking of women for MSNBC. Lam has explored political stories like embryo adoption for Swiss television and California Indian casinos for California public television.
With her training in music and dance, Lam has also crafted numerous documentaries about the performing arts, including films about the San Francisco Symphony, Cal Performances, and numerous performing groups like Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Perm Tchaikovsky Ballet. She is currently co-producing and shooting a documentary about Amy Tan’s novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and its adaptation into an opera.
Lam is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University and has taught video production at UC Davis. She lives in California with her husband and children.
Contact: monicazemalam(at)gmail(dot)com
