A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(July 2024) |
Michael W. King | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Connecticut College (BA) University of Amsterdam (MA) |
| Occupation(s) | Filmmaker, Producer, Director and Writer |
| Years active | 1990–present |
| Children | 1 |
Michael W. King is an Emmy Award-winning American filmmaker, producer, director, and writer of music videos, documentaries, and narrative films. King is the founder of Michael W. King Productions, LLC., and lives with his son, Mathias, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is a current member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and a former board member of the International Documentary Association (IDA).
In 1991, Michael W. King produced an MTV music video based on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech "I Have A Dream". [1] In 1995, King produced, directed, and wrote a PBS documentary titled Making A Living, the African-American Experience, which featured American actor Joe Morton. In 1997, he directed and wrote his first feature film in the Czech Republic, entitled Vanity Kills. In 1999, King created an Emmy award-winning PBS documentary entitled Bangin’, featuring Chuck D from Public Enemy, which explored youth violence in America. [2]
In 2007, he completed a feature documentary called Rapping with Shakespeare (2008), [3] which followed the story of an English teacher who used hip hop and rap to help his students better access Shakespeare's works, while making parallels between the lives of five South Central Los Angeles teenagers and Shakespeare's characters.
Michael King also executive produced Crenshaw Nights, starring Vondie Curtis-Hall and Judd Nelson in 2008 for the American Film Institute.
In 2010 King produced, directed, and wrote a documentary called The Rescuers, which tells the story of 13 heroic World War II diplomats who helped save the lives of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. The Rescuers stars historian and Holocaust expert Sir Martin Gilbert and Rwandan anti-genocide activist Stephanie Nyombayire, and features Prince Charles, Prince of Wales. [4]
On Thursday, September 22, 2022, a remastered version of ‘The Rescuers’ was shown for one night only at The Mandell JCC to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the film's release. The panel for the post-film discussion featured Debórah Dwork, Ph.D., Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity The Graduate Center – City University of New York; Dr. Stephanie Fagin-Jones, clinical psychologist, Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University Teachers College, and a Holocaust heroism science scholar; Joel N. Lohr, Ph.D., President of Hartford International University for Religion and Peace; and Dr. Sylvia Smoller, Scientist, writer and Holocaust Survivor. The panel was moderated by Avinoam J. Patt, Ph.D. , The Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. [5]
Michael W. King was approached in 2021 by the USC Shoah Foundation for the survivor testimonies from ‘The Rescuers’ for their Visual History Archive. In building the testimonies for the Andrew J. and Joyce D. Mandell International Rescuers Collection, [6] King decided to expand his research efforts to identify additional survivors and relatives to document the stories of additional diplomats with Righteous Among the Nations status. With that developed “The Rescuers Last Chance Project,” a ‘race against time’ to identify the people who knew the remaining diplomats and Holocaust survivors who benefited from their assistance, in telling those stories. "The Rescuers". IMDb.
| Year | Production | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Arts and Entertainment Revue TV Series | Producer |
| 1995 | Making a Living: the African-American Experience | Director, Producer and Writer |
| 1997 | Vanity Kills | Writer and Director |
| 1999 | Bangin | Writer, Producer and Director |
| 2002 | Breaking the Silence, Sex is Not a Four Letter Word | Director |
| 2007 | Rapping With Shakespeare | Director and Producer |
| 2008 | Crenshaw Nights | Executive Producer |
| 2010 | The Rescuers | Director, Producer and Writer |
| Year | Award | Organization | Work | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Best Documentary | Emmy | Bangin' | PBS documentary feature | Won |
| 1999 | Best Documentary and Best Editing | International Television and Video Association | Bangin' | PBS documentary feature | Won |
| 2008 | A&E Indie Filmmaker Award | A&E IndieFilms | Rapping with Shakespeare | Documentary | Nominated |
| 2002 | Carl Lutz Medal of Freedom | Switzerland | The Rescuers | Documentary Feature | Awarded |
| 2010 | Harriet Buescher Lawrence ’34 Prize | Connecticut College | Lifetime achievement | outstanding contributions to society | Awarded |
| 2012 | Outstanding Documentary | The NAACP Image Awards | The Rescuers | Documentary | Nominated |
| 2024 | Lifetime Achievement | Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition U.S. Congress (Congressional Award) | Rescuers - Last Chance Project | Documentary | Awarded |
On Monday, May 6, 2024, the remastered version of ‘The Rescuers’ was shown before Senators and members of Congress, commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom HaShoah and in support of The Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust Congressional Gold Medal Act. The panel for a pre-film discussion featured Dr. Edmund Duckwitz, the Ambassador (ret.) of the Federal Republic of Germany; Birgitta Tazelaar, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the U.S.; and Ellen Germain, the U.S. State Department Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues. Peter Alexander, NBC Chief White House Correspondent, moderated the panel. Before the screening of the film, Director/Producer Michael W. King was presented with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition by Congressman John B. Larson for his accomplished 35 years of commitment and service to humanitarian and artistic endeavors. "WUSA". Vimeo. "KNTV". Vimeo. "WTTG". Vimeo. [7]

Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the historical novel Schindler's Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
The Schindlerjuden, literally translated from German as "Schindler Jews", were a group of roughly 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust. They survived the years of the Nazi regime primarily through the intervention of Schindler, who afforded them protected status as industrial workers at his enamelware factory in Kraków, capital of the General Government, and after 1944, in an armaments factory in occupied Czechoslovakia. There, they avoided being sent to death camps and survived the genocide. Schindler expended his personal fortune made as an industrialist to save the Schindlerjuden.
The Last Days is a 1998 American documentary film directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor and Kenneth Lipper; Steven Spielberg, in his role as founder of the Shoah Foundation, was one of the film's executive producers. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, focusing on the last year of World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and began mass deportations of Jews in the country to concentration and extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz. It depicts the horrors of life in the camps, but also stresses the optimism and perseverance of the survivors.

The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar, thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
Michael Berenbaum is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. He served as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust (1979–1980), Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) (1988–1993), and Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute (1993–1997).
Samuel D. Kassow is an American historian of the history of Ashkenazi Jewry.
José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran Army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with Jewish-Romanian businessman György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews, most of them from Hungary, from Nazi persecution by providing them with fake Salvadoran citizenship certificates.
Killing Kasztner: The Jew who Dealt with the Nazis is a feature-length theatrical documentary about Rudolf Kastner, and directed by Gaylen Ross.
Jewish Community Centre of Kraków is a secular cultural and educational centre that opened in 2008 as the result of an initiative by the Prince of Wales. The site is leased from the official Jewish Community of Kraków. "JCC" is located in the Kazimierz district of Kraków on ul. Miodowa. It stands on the site of a garden to the rear of the Tempel Synagogue, abutting the adjacent building.

Turkish Passport is a 2011 Turkish film directed by Burak Arliel that purports to tell the story of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust by Turkish diplomats. It was promoted as "the only Holocaust film with a happy ending".
Pierre Sauvage is a French-American documentary filmmaker and lecturer, who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. He is described by Tablet Magazine as "a filmmaker of rare moral perception."

My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes is a 2014 documentary film, directed and written by Oren Jacoby, that tells the story of the rescue of thousands of Italian Jews during World War II by ordinary and prominent Italians, including the champion cyclist Gino Bartali. The film had its U.S. premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October 2014, and opened at theaters in Los Angeles and New York in March 2015.
Word of the Righteous is a 2017 documentary series directed and produced by journalists Svitlana Levitas and Margarita Yakovleva, co-authors of a Ukrainian-Israeli-US project dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations.
Jacqueline Semha Nataf Gmach is a Tunisian-born, Sorbonne-trained American educator. Her work focuses on Jewish culture, Sephardic history, and preserving the artistic achievements of people victimized by the Holocaust.
The Rescuers is a 2011 documentary film directed and produced by Michael W. King.
The Rescuers-Last Chance Project is being produced by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Michael W. King in association with USC/Shoah Foundation and the Andrew J. and Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation. King and Joyce D. Mandell, creators and producers of the 2011 award-winning documentary The Rescuers (documentary), featuring renowned historian Sir Martin Gilbert, lead this new project.