 |
Jon Matthews, (born September 1, 1977) is an American film director, writer, producer, and actor. He is best known for his documentary, Surviving Cliffside, which premiered at the 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival, [1] and for "Black Dog, Red Dog" a film he co-directed with James Franco.[ citation needed ]
Matthews was born in Alum Creek, West Virginia, [2] and was raised in a Christian household.[ citation needed ] As a child he wrote and illustrated comic books, creating his own characters and stories.[ citation needed ]
Matthews attended West Virginia University,[ citation needed ] and there was exposed to a wide variety of film styles.[ citation needed ] He studied Sociology and took classes on feminist theory, and race and gender stratification in society.[ citation needed ] He was active in civil rights groups on campus.[ citation needed ]
Matthews enrolled in West Virginia University's College of Law in 1999. [ citation needed ] There he started an American Civil Liberties chapter[ citation needed ] and re-formed the National Lawyers Guild chapter at the law school.[ citation needed ] He graduated in 2002.[ citation needed ]
Matthews started a private law practice in West Virginia, focusing on civil rights and consumer law. After a year he was hired as Assistant Attorney General, he worked in the Civil Rights Division, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination.[ citation needed ]
Four years later Matthews was hired at a private firm, where he continued to do civil rights cases.[ citation needed ] Also during this time, Matthews became Legal Chair of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, coordinating their legal docket and litigating cases himself,[ citation needed ] including a religious discrimination case, where a Mormon student was denied a state-funded scholarship. [3]
Matthews became the Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut and went to live in Hartford. He represented the free speech rights of a hunger striker,[ citation needed ] the religious freedoms of death row inmates,[ citation needed ] and advocated for same sex marriage and LGBTQ rights.[ failed verification ] [4]
During this time Matthews also played steel guitar in a country band.[ citation needed ]
In 2009 Matthews left his law practice and moved to New York City, where he attended New York University's graduate film program as a Dean's Fellow. [5] [6] In his third year at NYU, Matthews was hired as Spike Lee's assistant.[ citation needed ] Lee watched the footage for Matthews' thesis documentary and later awarded him a grant to finish the film, Surviving Cliffside. [7] The film premiered at the SXSW Film Festival. [8] [9] It later screened at the West Virginia International Film Festival. [10]
After graduation, Matthews moved to Los Angeles, where he has written several feature films, television pilots, and commercials.[ citation needed ] In 2013, he and actress Abby Wathen started a kickstarter campaign to raise funds for one of their projects. [11]
During the summer of 2014, Matthews made a commercial for Castrol GTX Motor Oil.[ citation needed ] He also made a commercial for Chevrolet 4G LTE, which won second place in an international contest sponsored by MoFilm.[ citation needed ]
In the fall of 2014, Matthews programmed the inaugural Appalachian Queer Film Festival in Lewisburg, West Virginia. The festival, which he co-founded with activist Tim Ward, featured two films from Sundance and the Grand Jury winner from South by Southwest. [12]
In 2015, Matthews began filming a feature film, Khali the Killer. [13]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University, a private research university in New York City.
Arthur Garfield Hays was an American lawyer and champion of civil liberties issues, best known as a co-founder and general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union and for participating in notable cases including the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. He was a member of the Committee of 48 and a contributor to The New Republic. In 1937, he headed an independent investigation of an incident in which 19 people were killed and more than 200 wounded in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when police fired at them. His commission concluded the police had behaved as a mob and committed a massacre.
Douglas Eric Liman is an American film director and producer. He is known for directing the films Swingers (1996), Go (1999), The Bourne Identity (2002), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Jumper (2008), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), American Made (2017) and Road House (2024).
On May 1 the United States officially recognizes Law Day. It is meant to reflect on the role of law in the foundation of the country and to recognize its importance for society.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Sarah Jones is an American playwright, actress, and poet.
Matt Foreman is an American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights lawyer and activist with a background in political advocacy and civil rights work. He is Executive Director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco.
Kenji Yoshino is an American legal scholar and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law. Formerly, he was the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His work involves constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, civil and human rights, as well as law and literature, and Japanese law and society.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in Tunisia face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBTQ residents. Both male and female kinds of same-sex sexual activity are illegal in the country. According to the United States Department of State's 2018 report on human rights in Tunisia, "authorities occasionally use [the anti-sodomy law] to detain and question persons about their sexual activities and orientation, reportedly at times based on appearance alone."
Chet Pancake is an American filmmaker and musician. He is a co-founder of the Red Room Collective, the High Zero Foundation, the Charm City Kitty Club and the Transmodern Festival. He is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University and director of the Black Oak House Gallery. His documentary film Black Diamonds (2006), an examination of mountaintop removal mining, has received a number of awards.
Ira Gollobin was a civil rights and immigration attorney who was involved for over seven decades in civil liberties, immigration, and extradition cases. Gollobin wrote extensively on the civil liberties and civil rights of both the native- and foreign-born.
Dustin Lance Black is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and LGBT rights activist. He is known for writing the film Milk, for which he won the Oscar for best original screenplay in 2009. He has also subsequently written the screenplays for the film J. Edgar and the 2022 crime miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven.
A law review or law journal is a scholarly journal or publication that focuses on legal issues. A law review is a type of legal periodical. Law reviews are a source of research, imbedded with analyzed and referenced legal topics; they also provide a scholarly analysis of emerging legal concepts from various topics. The primary function of a law review is to publish scholarship in the field of law. Law reviews publish lengthy, comprehensive treatments of subjects, that are generally written by law professors, and to a lesser extent judges, or legal practitioners. The shorter pieces, attached to the articles, commonly called "notes" and "comments", often are written by law student members of the law review. Law review articles often express the thinking of specialists or experts with regard to problems, in a legal setting, with potential solutions to those problems. Historically, law review articles have been influential in the development of the law; they have been frequently cited as persuasive authority by courts. Some law schools publish specialized reviews, dealing with a particular area of the law, such as civil rights and civil liberties, international law, environmental law, and human rights. Some specialized reviews focus on statutory, regulatory, and public policy issues.
The Case Against 8 is an American documentary film, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2014. Directed and produced by Ben Cotner and Ryan White, the film documents the legal battle to overturn California's Proposition 8, focusing in particular on behind-the-scenes footage of David Boies and Theodore Olson during the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case.
Surviving Cliffside is a 2014 documentary film and the directorial debut of Jon Matthews. The film premiered at the 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival and follows a family that lives in a Cliffside, a trailer park in Alum Creek, West Virginia, known for its crime and drugs. During production, Jon Matthews was mentored by filmmaker Debra Granik and filmmaker Spike Lee, who also awarded him a grant to complete the film.
Matthew Puccini is an American filmmaker. He is known for his short films that deal with LGBT-related subject matters. These include The Mess He Made (2017), Marquise (2018), Dirty (2020) and Lavender (2019). His films have played at several festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Aspen Shortsfest, Palm Springs ShortsFest, and Outfest Los Angeles. His work has also been featured on Topic and The Huffington Post.
Tetris is a 2023 biographical thriller film based on true events around the race to license and patent the video game Tetris from Russia in the late 1980s during the Cold War. It was directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Noah Pink. The film stars Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, and Anthony Boyle. The plot follows Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software, who becomes interested in a game during an electronics show. Desperate to obtain handheld console rights for Nintendo, he takes trips between Japan, the United States, and Russia to win legal battles over the game's ownership.
Emma Seligman is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for the films Shiva Baby (2020) and Bottoms (2023).
Boycott is a documentary film about three Americans' lawsuits against their state governments in response to anti-BDS laws which caused said governments to cancel their business contracts after they refused to pledge that they would not engage in a boycott of Israel. The film is directed by Julia Bacha; it premiered in 2021.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)