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Heidi Ewing | |
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 Heidi Ewing at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival | |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Known for | Observational filmmaking. |
Heidi Ewing is an American documentary filmmaker and the co-director of Jesus Camp , The Boys of Baraka , 12th & Delaware , DETROPIA , Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, One of Us , Love Fraud (series), I Carry You With Me (narrative) and Endangered.
Ewing is a native of the Detroit area. She was introduced to film by her father who encouraged her and her siblings to watch Fellini films at a young age. But it was her exposure to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" at the age of ten that had the greatest impact. "It blew my mind into thousands of pieces, and I couldn't stop going back to see it over and over again," she says. "I didn't know something could be so potent." [1]
Ewing graduated of Mercy High School [2] and then attended and graduated from the Georgetown University. [3]
In 2001 she and Rachel Grady founded Loki Films in New York. [4]
Her first film as a director was the short "Dissident: Oswaldo Paya and The Varela Project," a short film financed by the National Democratic Institute [5] about the now deceased activist and his efforts to push for human rights in Cuba.
Her first feature-length documentary, "The Boys of Baraka," was co-directed with Rachel Grady. The film, made with ITVS, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was release theatrically by ThinkFilm before airing on PBS. [6] The film follows a group of 12-year-old boys from Baltimore who leave home for an experimental middle school in rural Kenya. [7]
In 2006 she and Grady released "Jesus Camp," which premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures. [8] The film was nominated for the 2006 Academy Award. [9]
In 2011 she returned to her native Detroit to make "DETROPIA," an impressionistic documentary that focuses on the challenges of a shrinking city and those who refuse to give up on it. [10] The film premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and won the editing award [11]
In 2017 she co-directed Netflix Original film, "One of Us," which follows three Hasidic Jews who attempt to leave the insular community and pursue a secular life. The film premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. Ewing appeared on Charlie Rose in October 2017 to discuss the film and said that Hasidic Jews died disproportionally in the Holocaust because they "refused to blend in". She later apologized. [12]
Ewing made her narrative debut in 2020 with "I Carry You With Me," a love story based on her two close friends, Ivan and Gerardo, who had emigrated to the United States from a conservative town in Mexico. The film began as a documentary, but over the course of the process Ewing realized it was best presented as a narrative film with non-fiction elements woven through. [13] The film made its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival where it won the jury and audiences awards in the festival's NEXT section. The film was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards and was released by Sony Pictures Classics in 2021.
Ewing recently co-directed "Endangered," a film for HBO on the silencing of journalists around the world.
| Film | Year | Subject matter | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Boys of Baraka | 2005 | Baraka School, Kenya | |
| Jesus Camp | 2006 | Kids On Fire School of Ministry, Becky Fischer | |
| The Lord's Boot Camp | 2008 | Teen Missions International | Produced and aired for 48 Hours |
| Freakonomics (segment "Can You Bribe a 9th Grader to Succeed?") | 2010 | 2005 book of the same name | |
| 12th & Delaware | 2010 | A crisis pregnancy center and an abortion clinic in Fort Pierce, Florida | |
| Detropia | 2012 | Detroit, Michigan | [14] |
| The Education of Mohammad Hussein | 2012 | ||
| Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You | 2016 | Norman Lear | |
| A Dream Preferred | 2016 | Taharka Bros. | |
| One of Us | 2017 | Four former members of the Hasidic Jewish community. | |
| I Carry You With Me | 2020 | Narrative film | |
| Love Fraud | 2020 | True crime documentary miniseries revolves around Richard Scott Smith, who used the internet to prey upon women in search of love and conned them | |
| Endangered | 2022 | An investigation of threats against journalists in the United States and internationally, from intimidation to physical violence. | |
Force Theory was a musical production team and performance art band from Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
The Boys of Baraka is a 2005 documentary film produced and directed by filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. The documentary follows twenty boys from Baltimore, Maryland who spend their seventh and eighth grade years at a rural boarding school in northern Kenya.
Cynthia Wade is an American television, commercial and film director, producer and cinematographer based in New York City. She has directed documentaries on social issues including Shelter Dogs in 2003 about animal welfare and Freeheld in 2007 about LGBT rights as well as television commercials and web campaigns. She has won over 40 film festival awards, won an Oscar in 2008, and was nominated for her second Oscar in 2013.
Megan Mylan is an Oscar-winning documentary film director, known for her films Simple as Water, Lost Boys of Sudan and Smile Pinki.
Rachel Grady is an American documentary filmmaker.
12th & Delaware is a documentary film set in a crisis pregnancy center and an abortion clinic across the street from it in Fort Pierce, Florida. The film was produced and filmed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing and covers the center and its patients over the period of a year. The film shows interviews of staff at both facilities, as well as pregnant women who are going to them. 12th & Delaware premiered on January 24, 2010, at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. It won a Peabody Award that same year "for its poignant portrait of women facing exceedingly difficult decisions at a literal intersection of opposing ideologies."
Nancy Schwartzman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a member of the Directors Guild of America.
Margaret Brown is an American film director who has directed four feature length documentaries. Her film Descendant, about the descendants of survivors of the last ship to carry enslaved Africans into the United States, was shortlisted for the 2023 Academy Awards.
Joe Brewster, M.D. is an American psychiatrist and filmmaker who directs and produces fiction films, documentaries and new media focused on the experiences of communities of color.
Detropia is a 2012 American documentary film, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, about the city of Detroit, Michigan. It focuses on the decline of the economy of Detroit due to long-term changes in the automobile industry, and the effects that the decline has had on the city's residents and infrastructure.
Luzer Twersky is an American film and television actor. He is best known for his role in the film Felix and Meira, for which he garnered a Jutra Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor at the 18th Jutra Awards and won the Best Actor award at the Amiens International Film Festival and the Torino International Film Festival.
Maite Alberdi Soto is a Chilean film producer, director, documentarian, screenwriter, and film critic. Her film The Mole Agent (2020) was an Academy Awards nominee for Best Documentary and a contender for Best International Feature. The film was also a nominee at the Goya Awards for Best Iberoamerican Film. Maite is the founder of Micromundo Producciones.
Kahane Cooperman is an American documentary filmmaker and television director and producer, whose 2016 documentary Joe's Violin was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
One of Us is a 2017 documentary feature film that chronicles the lives of three ex-Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn. The film was directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who also created the documentary Jesus Camp. One of Us opened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017, and was distributed the following month of October via Netflix, which also financed the film.
The 2020 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 23 to February 2, 2020. The first lineup of competition films was announced on December 4, 2019. The opening night film was Miss Americana directed by Lana Wilson and produced by Morgan Neville, Caitrin Rogers, and Christine O'Malley.
Love Fraud is an American true crime documentary miniseries, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, about the hunt for a serial romance scammer. It premiered on August 30, 2020, on Showtime.
I Carry You with Me (Te Llevo Conmigo) is a 2020 Spanish-language drama film directed by Heidi Ewing, from a screenplay by Ewing and Alan Page Arriaga. It stars Armando Espitia, Christian Vázquez, Michelle Rodríguez, Ángeles Cruz, Arcelia Ramírez and Michelle González.
93Queen is a 2018 documentary film on Hasidic women in Borough Park, Brooklyn who form Ezras Nashim, an all-female ambulance corps. The film follows Judge Rachel Freier, a Hasidic lawyer running for public office as a New York Judge, and mother of six who is determined to shake up the “boys club” in her Hasidic community by creating the first all-female ambulance corps in the United States, as she negotiates her community initiative within the context of a male-dominated Hasidic community.
Baby God is an 2020 American documentary film, directed and produced by Hannah Olson, which follows Quincy Fortier, a doctor who used his own sperm to inseminate fertility patients. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady were executive producers under their Loki Films banner.
Katy Gale Chevigny is an American documentary filmmaker. She has produced or directed more than 30 documentary films and won a number of awards for her work.
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