By Elizabeth Thompson's 'Blink' tells the story of a white supremacist's struggle to break free

Town Crier Staff Report

Los Altos filmmaker Elizabeth Thompson won an Emmy award Sept. 5 for a news documentary about a former white supremacist trying to battle his demons while adjusting to a new life.

The film, “Blink,” won for Best Coverage of a Continuing News Story at the news and documentary presentations, held in New York.

This is not the first time the Los Altos resident has met with success. Her work on the film “For Better or For Worse” was nominated for an Emmy in 1994, and “Bookends,” won several international awards.

Thompson came to making “Blink” after reading about the plight of Greg Withrow, a one-time high-profile leader of a White Aryan group who renounced his ideology after he fell in love with a woman whose parents fled Nazi Germany.

“Blink” proves as much a triumph of Thompson’s perseverance as of her filmmaking. The one-hour documentary took 4 1/2 years to make, involving numerous trips to Withrow’s secluded Northern California home. She often had to coax her subject to cooperate.

“I’m interested in making sense of violence on a very personal level, and I’m also interested in the question of transformation and what that means,” Thompson said in an interview last year with Release Print. “I was also interested in the way racism plays out in the American imagination. How is it that one goes from fear to paranoia to hate, to the point where violence against an entire group of people makes logical sense to someone?”

Thompson, who has degrees from Duke and Stanford universities, currently lectures at Stanford.