Alexander Freeman (film director)

Last updated
Alexander Freeman
Alexander Freeman B&W.jpg
Born
Alexander James Freeman

(1987-06-19) June 19, 1987 (age 37)
NationalityAmerican
EducationFilm Production (Directing), Emerson College, 2014
Occupation(s) Film Director, Producer, and Screenwriter
Known forThe Last Taboo, My Own Normal
PartnerOrina Umansky Freeman
ChildrenMaya Ella Freeman
Website https://www.outcast-productions.com/

Alexander Freeman (born June 19,1987) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter with cerebral palsy. [1] [2] [3] He is dedicated to producing and directing documentaries, feature films, and series that bring visibility to those otherwise ignored by society and reinforce themes of morals and ethics.

Contents

Early life and education

Freeman was born in 1987 in Newton, Massachusetts. [4] He was interested in filmmaking from an early age and began to use his parents' video camera to create stories with his brother and a friend, including a makeshift version of Titanic in Brookline, Massachusetts. [1] His interest in the craft further developed during his time at Brookline High School, where he participated in the theatre program and took a life-changing video production class during his junior year. [1]

After completing high school, he worked for City Year in Boston, producing a recruitment film, before beginning his college education at Fitchburg State University in 2007. [1] A year later, he transferred to UMass Amherst due to dissatisfaction with his living situation. [1] Eventually, he found his niche at Emerson College, where he excelled in the film program and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film Production where he specialized in Directing. [5]

Career

Freeman's early works include a narrative adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven , which screened at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in 2008, and the documentary I Care: A Documentary About Independent Living, which led to his selection for the Very Special Arts/AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Apprenticeship program. [1] His film Meet Annabelle was also featured at the 2012 Picture This Film Festival and the Arlington International Film Festival. [1]

In 2012, Freeman made his directing dabut with the documentary The Last Taboo, which explored the sexual lives of people with physical disabilities. [6] [7] Two years later, The HSC Foundation honoured Freeman with the National Advocates in Disability Award for his advocacy work. [5]

In 2017, Freeman's documentary The Wounds We Cannot See chronicled Nancy Ross's struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction. [5] He received the Best Director (Documentary Feature) award at the 2016 Independent Film Festival Awards in Los Angeles for the film. [8] The film also won Best Documentary Feature at the Long Beach Indie International Film, Media, and Music Festival. [8] The Wounds We Cannot See was later released by Indie Rights. [9]

In 2024, Freeman’s documentary My Own Normal premiered at Independent Film Festival Boston. The film delves into Freeman’s personal life, chronicling his journey towards fatherhood and the emotional challenges he faced, particularly the difficult reaction of his parents to the pregnancy of his daughter Maya. The documentary explores themes of relationships, love, courage, family, acceptance, resilience, having a career, caregiving, and living within the boundaries of government assistance with a disability. Kevin S. Bright, Chris Cooper and Marianne Leone Cooper served as executive producers. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]


Freeman is also the founder and owner of Outcast Productions LLC. [8]

Filmography

Film

YearTitleContributionNotes
2006The PoetWriter, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2007Young HeroesProducer, Director, EditorShort film
2008The RavenDirector, Co-EditorShort film
2009The Tell-Tale HeartWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2010Meet AnnabelleWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2011The Power of a DollarWriter, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2011Faceless BeautyWriter, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2012Does Your Uncle Know?Writer, Producer, Director, Co-EditorShort film
2013I Care: A Documentary About Independent LivingWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Director, EditorDocumentary
2013The Last TabooWriter, Co-Producer, DirectorDocumentary
2013Seven DaysWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2013A Life ImperfectCo-Writer, Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Director, EditorShort film
2013Love and Hope of the Next GenerationWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2014One Day At A TimeCo-Writer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2014Thank YouWriter, Executive Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2014Dark Into LightWriter, Director, EditorShort film
2014BarrenExecutive ProducerShort film
2014Look At Me: Michael's StoryWriter, EditorShort film
2014Jesse Hanson: These WordsWriter, Director, EditorMusic Video
2015The BagWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2015A Little HopeWriter, Executive Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2015Depression: The Silent Killer PSAWriter, EditorShort film
2016Going UpWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2017The Wounds We Cannot SeeWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Co-EditorDocumentary
2017What Jamal SawWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Co-EditorShort film
2019The Last StrawCo-Writer, Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Director, Co-EditorShort film
2019Blind Eye to Differences Kissed by LoveWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, EditorShort film
2021The Afterlife OfficeCreator, Co-Writer, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Camera Operator, Co-EditorWeb Series
2022Making A Better FutureWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Camera Operator, Co-EditorDocumentary
2022The Next BreathWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Camera Operator, Co-EditorDocumentary
2024My Own NormalWriter, Producer, DirectorDocumentary
2024I Am the Voice for All My PeopleWriter, Executive Producer, Producer, Director, Music ArtistMusic Video

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Film Institute</span> Nonprofit educational arts organization

The American Film Institute (AFI) is an American nonprofit film organization that educates filmmakers and honors the heritage of the motion picture arts in the United States. AFI is supported by private funding and public membership fees.

Peter Kenneth Wintonick was a Canadian independent documentary filmmaker based in Montreal. A winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, former Thinker in Residence for the Premier of South Australia, prolific award-winning filmmaker, he was one of Canada's best known international documentarians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visions du Réel</span>

Visions du Réel is an internationally renowned documentary film festival held in April each year in Nyon, Switzerland. Established in 1969 as the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival, the event adopted its current name in 1995 and is the largest Swiss documentary festival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marianne Leone Cooper</span> American actress

Marianne Leone Cooper is an American film and television actress, screenwriter and essayist. Her longest-running recurring role was playing Christopher Moltisanti's mother on The Sopranos.

Kevin S. Bright is an American television executive producer and director. He is best known as the showrunner of the sitcoms Dream On and Friends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheffield DocFest</span> Documentary festival in Sheffield, England

Sheffield DocFest is an international documentary festival and industry marketplace held annually in Sheffield, England.

Renée Scheltema is a Dutch documentary filmmaker and photographer, living in Cape Town, South Africa. She has been making documentaries for 35 years.

The Documentary Film Institute, is an independent organization within San Francisco State University that is dedicated to support non-fiction cinema by promoting documentary films and filmmakers and producing films on socially and culturally important topics which deserve wider recognition. The director is Soumyaa Kapil Behrens, a professor in the cinema department at SFSU. It is situated within the College of Liberal & Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, with access to a broad cross-section of educational institutions in San Francisco and the Bay Area. It is a resource for undergraduate and graduate students studying film in the area as well as faculty interested in the artistic and politic dimensions of documentary cinema.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marshall Curry</span> American film director (born 1970)

Marshall Curry is an Oscar-winning American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).

<i>Marwencol</i> (film) 2010 American documentary film about the work of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp

Marwencol is a 2010 American documentary film that explores the life and work of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp. It is the debut feature of director Jeff Malmberg, produced through his production company Open Face. It was the inspiration for Welcome to Marwen, a 2018 drama directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Lindsey Dryden is a British film director, producer and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arlington International Film Festival</span>

The Arlington International Film Festival (AIFF) is an annual nonprofit film festival dedicated to promoting and increasing multicultural awareness and showcases world cinema and independent films in their original language with English subtitles. Independent film producers, directors and actors within the US and abroad are invited to participate in engaging panel discussions and Q&A sessions after the screenings. Each year the festival greets more than 2,000 movie aficionados and shows about fifty films from all over the world with an impressive lineup of premieres. The Arlington International Film Festival also includes a year-round events such as poster contest competitions, pre-festival screenings and art exhibitions with local artists and performances by musicians, singers and dancers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi</span> American film director

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017. Their first scripted film venture was Nyad, a biopic chronicling Diana Nyad's quest to be the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.

New Haven Documentary Film Festival is an annual documentary film festival held in New Haven, Connecticut, in early June. Screenings take place at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, the New Haven Free Public Library and at the rock club Cafe Nine. NHdocs is a regional festival that showcases documentaries by filmmakers from the greater New Haven area and beyond. NHdocs was launched in 2014 when the film festival’s co-founders Charles Musser, Gorman Bechard, Jacob Bricca, and Lisa Molomot came together at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and decided to create a documentary film festival in New Haven that would “build a sense of community among documentary filmmakers from the greater New Haven area.” In 2014, the four filmmakers each showed one of their recently completed documentaries, three of which had just played at the Big Sky.

Isidore Bethel is a French-American filmmaker who was among Filmmaker's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2020 and DOC NYC's "40 Under 40" in 2023. The films he edits, directs, and produces use filmmaking to make sense of overwhelming experiences and touch on recurrent themes of displacement, sexuality, aging, trauma, grief, therapy, and art-making. His first feature film as director, Liam, premiered at the Boston LGBT Film Festival in 2018 and received the Jury Prize in the Documentary section of the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival. His second film, Acts of Love, which French actor Francis Leplay co-directed, premiered at Hot Docs, received the Tacoma Film Festival's Best Feature Award, and appeared on MovieWeb's list of the top LGBTQ+ films of 2021.

Mirosław Kępiński, known by his stage name Miro Kepinski, is a Polish film composer, music producer, and performer. Graduating from a Classical Music school in Mlawa, Poland as Musician Instrumentalist, he then expanded his musical knowledge by enrolling at the Jazz faculty of the Academy of Music in Katowice, Poland, graduating with the title ‘Bachelor of Art’. Miro has gone on to enjoy a career playing a broad palette of musical styles including classical, rock and electronic. Miro composes mainly for film and his compositions can be heard in productions all over the world from Sydney to Los Angeles. His most recent credits include the multiple-award-winning feature documentary 'The Wounds We Cannot See' by Alexander Freeman, drama 'In This Gray Place' by R.D.Womack II and a dark-comedy, horror 'Suicide for Beginners' by Craig Thieman. His music mixes minimalism with a ‘rawness’ of the north and a Slavic melancholy blended with the classic sounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivian Kleiman</span> American documentary film producer

Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Other honors include a National Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Research and an Academy Award nomination for Documentary Short.

<i>Hale County This Morning, This Evening</i> 2018 American film

Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a 2018 American documentary film about the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Su Kim, and is Ross's first nonfiction feature. The documentary is the winner of 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, 2018 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Cinema Eye Honors Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. After its theatrical run, it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and eventually won a 2020 Peabody Award.

Richard Butchins is a British filmmaker. He has worked as presenter and director of arts and current affairs documentaries, and as an investigative filmmaker, for television programmes such as BBC One's Panorama, Channel 4's Dispatches and ITV's Exposure. Having had an arm paralysed by polio as a child, and through also being neuro-diverse Butchins "uses his own experience as a disabled person to make work which addresses disability".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco Independent Film Festival</span> Annual festival held in San Francisco, California, U.S.

The San Francisco Independent Film Festival, known as IndieFest, is an annual film festival, held in January or February, that recognizes contemporary independent film. It is run by SF IndieFest, a non-profit organization, and based at the Roxie Theater in the Mission District.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Sex And Disability: Boston Filmmaker Turns Lens On 'The Last Taboo'". WBUR News . July 20, 2012.
  2. ↑ Bolton-Fasman, Judy. "Wounds We Cannot See: A New Film About What Ails Us and Heals Us". Jewish Boston.
  3. ↑ "Alexander Freeman | Producer, Director, Writer". IMDb. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
  4. ↑ "Alexander Freeman". Rotten Tomatoes .
  5. 1 2 3 "Filmmaker: "We Need to Open Up the Door" to People with Disabilities". Emerson Today. June 28, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Ex-Madam Uses Her Sex Skills to Run 'Brothel' for Disabled". ABC News.
  7. ↑ Poulisse, Adam (February 17, 2013). "Love, intimacy in disabled community at forefront amid recognition of acclaimed movies". The Berkshire Eagle .
  8. 1 2 3 Clossey, Erin (May 28, 2019). "Four Alumni to Be Honored for Professional Achievement June 1". Emerson Today.
  9. ↑ "Watch The Wounds We Cannot See". Amazon. Retrieved 1 October 2024.{{cite web}}: Text "Prime Video" ignored (help)
  10. ↑ Ertischek, David (30 April 2024). "Emerson-Directed Films Aplenty at IFFBoston". Emerson Today. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
  11. ↑ Onanian, Nora (11 November 2023). "Interview: Filmmaker Alexander Freeman is "Defying the Odds"". Independent Magazine. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
  12. ↑ Arceneaux, Bill. "Special Coverage: The 2024 San Francisco Documentary Festival, Part 1". www.moviegoing.rocks. Retrieved 2 August 2024.
  13. ↑ Grady, Pam. "6 films you can't miss at SF DocFest". Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide. Retrieved 2 August 2024.
  14. ↑ Propes, Richard. "Movie Review: My Own Normal". The Independent Critic. Retrieved 2 August 2024.
  15. ↑ Jeffrey M., Anderson (30 May 2024). "SF DocFest returns this week with locals in lineup". San Francisco Examiner. Retrieved 2 August 2024.
  16. ↑ LePire, Bobby (6 May 2024). "My Own Normal Featured, Reviews Film Threat". Film Threat. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  17. ↑ Wong, Peter (3 June 2024). "Wrap-up Reviews From SF DocFest 2024". Beyond Chron. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  18. ↑ Kakadelis, Tina. ""My Own Normal" - Film Review". Beyond the Cinerama Dome. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  19. ↑ Kermode, Jennie. "My Own Normal (2024) Movie Review from Eye for Film". www.eyeforfilm.co.uk. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.