Errol Mark Morris is an American film director primarily of documentaries examining and investigating, among other things, authorities and eccentrics. His 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line is cited among the best and most influential documentaries ever made. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Stanley Earl Kramer was an American film director and producer, responsible for making many of Hollywood's most famous "message films". As an independent producer and director, he brought attention to topical social issues that most studios avoided. Among the subjects covered in his films were racism, nuclear war, greed, creationism vs. evolution and the causes and effects of fascism. His other notable films included High Noon, The Caine Mutiny, and Ship of Fools (1965).
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised and encouraged by the British government. Importantly the British government waived all those visa immigration requirements which were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government put no number limit on the programme – it was the start of World War II that brought the programme to an end, at which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the United Kingdom.
Richard Brooks was an American screenwriter, film director, novelist and film producer. Nominated for eight Oscars in his career, he was best known for Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood (1967) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).
Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish director. His films include One Day in September (1999), a documentary about the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes, the climbing documentary Touching the Void (2003), the drama The Last King of Scotland (2006), the political thriller State of Play (2009), the Bob Marley documentary Marley (2012), the post-apocalyptic drama How I Live Now (2013), the thriller Black Sea (2014), and the Whitney Houston documentary Whitney (2018).
Frank Joseph Perry Jr. was an American stage director and filmmaker. The 1962 independent film David and Lisa was nominated for two Academy Awards for best director and best screenplay. The couple would go on to collaborate on five more films including the cult classic The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, Diary of a Mad Housewife starring Carrie Snodgress, and the Emmy Award–nominated A Christmas Memory, which was based on a short story by Truman Capote and also adapted by his wife Eleanor. Perry went on to form Corsair Pictures, which was privately financed by United Artists Theatres, producing two film flops, Miss Firecracker and A Shock to the System, before folding. His later films include the Razzie Award–nominee Joan Crawford bio drama Mommie Dearest and the documentary On the Bridge, about his battle with prostate cancer. Author Justin Bozung, who has been researching the filmmaker's life since 2013, is currently writing the official biography of Frank Perry titled Character Is Story: The Life & Films of Frank Perry. The book is due out in 2020.
Bruce Sinofsky was an American documentary film director, particularly known for his films the Paradise Lost trilogy, Brother's Keeper and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, all created with Joe Berlinger.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport is the 2000 Academy Award-winning Warner Bros. documentary feature film about the remarkable British rescue operation, known as the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of over 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia by transporting them via train, boat, and plane to Great Britain. These children, or Kinder in German, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again. Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, narrated by Judi Dench, and made with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it utilized rare and extensive footage, photographs, and artifacts, and is told in the words of the child survivors, rescuers, parents, and foster parents.
The Children Who Cheated the Nazis is a documentary about the Kindertransport, by the director Sue Read and producer Jim Goulding. This documentary film was broadcast by Channel 4 on 28 September 2000, and has since been broadcast in America, Israel, France, Australia, Spain and worldwide.
Eran Preis is an Israeli–American director, screenwriter, playwright, and producer. Beyond the Walls, a film he co-wrote in 1984, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He has taught screenwriting and International Cinema for decades.
Ori Sivan is an Israeli film and television director and screenwriter. In a career spanning over two decades, he covered feature films, TV drama, TV movies, and documentaries. Sivan and his work won 11 Israeli Film Academy Awards, as well as international film awards, across all the above fields of film making. Sivan is the co-creator of In Treatment, the first Israeli TV drama series to ever be sold for re-make in the US, followed by re-make in over 20 countries.
Strangers No More is a 2010 short documentary film about a school in Tel Aviv, Israel, where children from 48 different countries and diverse backgrounds come together to learn. The parents of these children are among over 300,000 transnational migrant workers who have arrived in Israel—some with government authorization and others undocumented.
Steven Ascher is an American independent director, producer and writer. He was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Daniel Junge is an American documentary filmmaker. On February 26, 2012, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the film Saving Face, which he co-directed along with Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
5 Broken Cameras is a 94-minute documentary film co-directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi. It was shown at film festivals in 2011 and placed in general release by Kino Lorber in 2012. 5 Broken Cameras is a first-hand account of protests in Bil'in, a West Bank village affected by the Israeli West Bank barrier. The documentary was shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son. In 2009 Israeli co-director Guy Davidi joined the project. Structured around the destruction of Burnat's cameras, the filmmakers' collaboration follows one family's evolution over five years of turmoil. The film won a 2012 Sundance Film Festival award, it won the Golden Apricot at the 2012 Yerevan International Film Festival, Armenia, for Best Documentary Film, won the 2013 International Emmy Award, and was nominated for a 2013 Academy Award.
Bryn Mooser is a filmmaker and entrepreneur. In 2012 Mooser co-founded RYOT, a media company specializing in documentary film, Virtual/Augmented Reality and branded content. Over his career, he has produced more than 200 linear and immersive films garnering multiple Emmy Awards, two Oscar nominations, a Peabody and a Cannes Lion. Mooser sold RYOT to Verizon in 2016, becoming an SVP and helping create the roadmap for immersive and documentary films for AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. While at Verizon, Mooser built the branded content studio for AOL/Yahoo, HuffPost and Tumblr.
Kate Amend is an American documentary film editor whose career spans more than thirty years. She is known for being a dedicated editor who finds the emotional center of each scene she works with. A member of American Cinema Editors, Amend is the recipient of an Eddie Award for Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2001); she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for The Case Against 8 (2014). She was the editor on two Academy Award-winning films: Into the Arms of Strangers (2014) and the Long Way Home (1997). She is the recipient of the International Documentary Association’s inaugural award for Outstanding Achievement in Editing. Amend graduated from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University with a master's in humanities, later gaining an interest in film while teaching her discipline at the City College of San Francisco. She worked briefly at a production company of exploitation films before breaking into documentary work as an apprentice editor on Johanna Demetrakas's Right Out of History (1980). Amend is also noted for her work on Birth Story (2012) and The Long Way Home (1997).
Deborah Oppenheimer is an American film and television producer. She won an Academy Award in 2001 for best documentary feature for producing Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000). The film was written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, released by Warner Bros., and made with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Judi Dench narrated. Following its theatrical release, it appeared on HBO and PBS.
Marianna Yarovskaya is an award-winning Russian-American documentary filmmaker who is the director and producer of the 2018 Academy Award short-listed documentary film Women of the Gulag based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory(2013). Best Documentary Short shortlist nominee, 2018 Academy Awards. She also produced Greedy Lying Bastards (2012).
