The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses eight academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program and the Expanded Animation Research + Practice Program.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, 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, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
James Francis Ivory is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was a principal in Merchant Ivory Productions along with Indian film producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio is known for making film adaptations of stories by authors such as E.M. Forster and Henry James. Their body of work is celebrated for its elegance, sophistication, literary fidelity, strong performances, complex themes, and rich characters.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport is a 2000 documentary film about the British rescue operation known as the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig 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.
Ben Shedd is an American director, producer, and writer of film and video. He shared the 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968 and Yale University in 1973.
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.
The Redwoods is a 1967 American short documentary film produced by Trevor Greenwood and Mark Jonathan Harris. It was produced for the Sierra Club as part of their campaign for a national park to protect the redwood forest. In 1968, it won an Oscar at the 40th Academy Awards for Documentary Short Subject.
Lee Elwood Holdridge is a Haitian-born American composer, conductor, and orchestrator. An 18-time Emmy Award nominee, he has won two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Daytime Emmy Awards, two News and Documentary Emmy Awards, and one Sports Emmy Award. He has also been nominated for two Grammy Awards.
Leslie Iwerks is an American producer, director, and writer. She is daughter of Disney Legend Don Iwerks and granddaughter of Disney Legend Ub Iwerks, the animator and co-creator of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. She has directed films including Recycled Life which was nominated for an Academy Award and The Pixar Story which was nominated for an Emmy for best nonfiction special.
Lore Vailer Segal was an Austrian-American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer, and author of children's books. She was the author of five novels, and was known for her autobiographical fiction, drawing on her life as an Austrian Jewish refugee who fled to the United Kingdom as a child, growing up in England before settling in the United States. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare's Kitchen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
Theodore Braun is an American filmmaker best known for his feature documentaries Darfur Now (2007), Betting on Zero (2017), and ¡Viva Maestro! (2022). He works in non-fiction across documentary and scripted forms with a focus on global conflict. He has won the International Documentary Association's Emerging Filmmaker Award, an NAACP Image Award for Best Feature Documentary and been nominated twice for the WGA Award for Best Feature Documentary Screenplay.
Todd Robinson is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton is a 2002 documentary about Nicholas Winton, the man who organized the Kindertransport rescue mission of 669 children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War. Director Matej Mináč was inspired by meeting Winton while developing the film treatment for All My Loved Ones.
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). Oppenheimer co-authored a companion book for the film with Mark Jonathan Harris, and also produced the film's soundtrack.
Women of the Gulag is a 2018 US short documentary film directed by Marianna Yarovskaya. and based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory (2013). Executive Produced by Mitchell Block and Mark Jonathan Harris, it was a Best Documentary Short shortlist nominee at the 2018 Academy Awards.
Marianna Yarovskaya is a 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). She also produced Greedy Lying Bastards (2012).
Jason Rosenfield is an American film editor, writer, director, producer and educator known mostly for his work in story-driven feature-length documentaries. Elected to membership in American Cinema Editors., an honorary society of distinguished editors, he has earned multiple Emmy Awards for his work and contributed to numerous additional awards, including an Emmy Award and three nominations, an Academy Award nomination, a Peabody and R.F. Kennedy Award.
Ben Proudfoot is a Canadian filmmaker. He directed The Queen of Basketball, winner of the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject; as well as codirector with Kris Bowers of the short documentary film A Concerto Is a Conversation, which was an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021. He and Bowers were also winners of the 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for The Last Repair Shop.
