Filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, known for underdog documentaries, dies at 65

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Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died.He was 65.

Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote.

“Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts.The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements.

The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.” Lindstrom was born Feb.

12, 1961.The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore.

— which he and his family still called home.He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska.During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center.

There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored di...