| I Am a Promise | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Susan Raymond |
| Produced by |
|
| Cinematography | Alan Raymond |
| Music by | Tom Verlaine |
Production company | Video Verite Films |
| Distributed by | HBO |
Release date |
|
Running time | 88 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School is a 1993 American documentary film about the pupils at Stanton Elementary School, an inner city school in Philadelphia. [1] [2] It was aired on HBO as part of its America Undercover series. [3]
The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature [4] for producers [5] Alan and Susan Raymond. [6] It also was the recipient of the Primetime Emmy Award for Best Informational Special and a 1995 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award [7] [8]
The husband and wife documentarians were also the cinematographer and editor (Alan) as well as director and narrator (Susan) for the film.
The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film is an award for documentary films. In 1941, the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Special Awards to Kukan and Target for Tonight. They have since been bestowed competitively each year, with the exception of 1946. Copies of every winning film are held by the Academy Film Archive.
Conrad Lafcadio Hall, ASC was a French Polynesian-born American cinematographer. Named after writers Joseph Conrad and Lafcadio Hearn, he became widely prominent as a cinematographer earning numerous accolades including three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards and five American Society of Cinematographers Awards.
Dame Julia Mary Walters, known professionally as Julie Walters, is an English actress. She is the recipient of four British Academy Television Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two International Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award.
Louis Marie Malle was a French film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in both French cinema and Hollywood. Described as "eclectic" and "a filmmaker difficult to pin down", Malle made documentaries, romances, period dramas, and thrillers. He often depicted provocative or controversial subject matter.
Howard Leslie Shore is a Canadian composer, conductor and orchestrator noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings, with one being for the song "Into the West", an award he shared with Eurythmics lead vocalist Annie Lennox and writer/producer Fran Walsh, who wrote the lyrics. He is a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979, and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on six of his films.
Rita Moreno is an American actress, dancer, and singer. She has performed on stage and screen in a career spanning over eight decades. Moreno is one of the last remaining stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Among her numerous accolades, she is one of the few actors to have been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony (EGOT) and the Triple Crown of Acting, with individual competitive Academy, Emmy, and Tony awards. Additional accolades include the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, the National Medal of Arts in 2009, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2013, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2015, and a Peabody Award in 2019.
Michael David Apted was an English television and film director and producer.
America Undercover is a series of documentaries that aired on the cable television network HBO from 1983 through 2006. Within the series are several sub-series, such as Autopsy, Real Sex, and Taxicab Confessions.
The 66th Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored films released in 1993 and took place on March 21, 1994, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles beginning at 6:00 p.m. PST / 9:00 p.m. EST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards in 23 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Gil Cates and directed by Jeff Margolis. Actress Whoopi Goldberg hosted the show for the first time. This ceremony was the first to present the annual In Memoriam tribute. Nearly a month earlier in a ceremony held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California on February 26, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Laura Dern.
Barbara Kopple is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic french style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1977), about a Kentucky miners' strike, and for American Dream (1991), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota, making her the first woman to win two Oscars in the Best Documentary category.
Charles Henry Ferguson is an American angel investor and strategic advisor to early stage technology startups and venture capital firms, especially in artificial intelligence. He is also the founder and president of Representational Pictures, Inc. and director and producer of four feature documentaries, including No End in Sight (2007), which won the Sundance Special Jury Prize and Inside Job (2010), which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Prior to making films, Ferguson was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Visiting Scholar at MIT and UC Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Earlier in his career Ferguson was the founder and CEO of Vermeer Technologies, developer of FrontPage, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996. Ferguson holds a BA in mathematics from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. Ferguson is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the board of directors of the French American Foundation.
He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin' is a 1983 American documentary film directed by Emile Ardolino.
Raoul Peck is a Haitian filmmaker of both documentary and feature films. He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events. Peck was Haiti's Minister of Culture from 1996 to September 1997. His film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017 and won a César Award in France. Peck's HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), received a Peabody Award.
Edward Lachman is an American cinematographer and director. He has primarily worked in independent film, and has served as director of photography on films by Todd Haynes, Ulrich Seidl, Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Schrader. His other work includes Werner Herzog's La Soufrière (1977), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999), Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion (2006), and Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (2009). He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
Robert Stone is a British-American documentary filmmaker. His work has been screened at dozens of film festivals and televised around the world, notably seven of his films have appeared on PBS's American Experience series and four of his films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is an Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary and a three-time Emmy nominee for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
Nila Madhab Panda is an Indian film producer and director. Panda has directed and produced over 70 films, documentaries, and shorts based on social issues, such as climate change, child labor, education, water issues, sanitation and other developmental issues in India. Many of his films are based on his own experiences. He has won several awards and received critical acclaim for his films which have been described as "entertaining yet socially relevant."
Richard Franklin Chew is an American film editor, best known for his Academy Award-winning work on Star Wars (1977), alongside Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas. Other notable films include One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Risky Business (1983), Waiting to Exhale (1995), That Thing You Do! (1996), and I Am Sam (2001). His career over a variety of films spans more than four decades.
Dorothy Fadiman is an American documentary filmmaker, director, and producer.
Graham Moore is an American screenwriter, author and director known for his 2010 novel The Sherlockian, as well as his screenplay for the historical film The Imitation Game, which topped the 2011 Black List for screenplays and won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Hébert Peck Jr. is a Haitian filmmaker. He produced the critically acclaimed documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, which he received a Best Documentary Feature nomination at the 89th Academy Awards, together with director Raoul Peck and producer Rémi Grellety.