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Stefan Forbes is an American screenwriter and film director whose films and social justice work often address issues of race, class, masculinity, violence, and restorative justice.
Forbes wrote, shot, directed, and edited the Emmy Award-nominated feature documentary Hold Your Fire, about the longest hostage siege in NYPD history and the birth of modern hostage negotiation. It premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival and was named one of the best films of 2022 by The New York Times.
Forbes' first feature film was the 2008 documentary film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story , about the life of political operative Lee Atwater. [1] The Washington Post called it "one of the greatest political movies ever."
Forbes also shot and co-directed the one-hour documentary One More Dead Fish, seen on PBS, about environmentally friendly handline fishermen in Canada who seized a federal building and barricaded themselves inside for 26 days. [2] Ken Loach called it "excellent" and historian Howard Zinn termed the film "an inspiring example of working people resisting the giant forces of globalization, in the great tradition of civil disobedience on behalf of justice."
In collaboration with Grammy-nominated composer John Beasley, Forbes wrote and directed the hour-long work Monk Recut, featuring recut performance footage of American composer Thelonious Monk in rhythmic, visual, and harmonic interplay with Beasley's inventive compositions for the big band MONK'estra. Featuring spoken word quotations from Monk's unique life philosophy, the work premiered at the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall in February 2018. Noted Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley termed the work "fabulous...breathtaking."
Mr. Forbes currently has several television and feature film projects in development. He has served on the nominating committees of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Independent Spirit Awards.
In addition to many music videos co-directed with Joseph Fergus, Jr., a former member of the rap group Concrete Clique, Forbes has also directed Emmy Award-nominated awareness campaigns about hunger in America featuring Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Steve Buscemi, Patti Smith, The Edge, Mike Myers, and Stanley Tucci. As a cinematographer, he shot seven independent feature films, one of which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.
Mr. Forbes has created awareness campaigns and consulted on media for ground-breaking social justice nonprofits such as The Posse Foundation, College Track, The International Rescue Committee, City Year, and Artists for Humanity. He has interviewed people such as Walter Cronkite, the Dalai Lama, Congressman John Lewis, Joseph Stiglitz, Arne Duncan, Gov. Lamar Alexander, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Sam Donaldson, Rudy Giuliani, and Colin Powell.
Mr. Forbes often does his own cinematography, editing, writing, and directing. He is represented by Gersh and Management 360.
Hold Your Fire was called "one of the best films of 2022" by the New York Times. It was nominated for an Emmy, was a Humanitas Prize finalist, won the Metropolis Grand Jury Award at the 2021 Doc NYC film festival, and was awarded the 2020 Library of Congress Better Angels Award for historical film by Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden. [3]
Forbes' production company, InterPositive Media, was named one of 2009's Global Top 100 Production Companies by RealScreen magazine.
Forbes is a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and the 2008 winner of the International Documentary Association's Emerging Filmmaker Award.
Boogie Man won a national Edward R. Murrow Award, the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism, and was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. [4] The Washington Post called Boogie Man "one of the best political films ever". It was a Critic's Pick in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The London Times.
Historian Howard Zinn called One More Dead Fish "An inspiring example of working people resisting the gigantic forces of globalization on behalf of justice". It won the Grand Prize at the Planet in Focus Film Festival, Canada's largest environmental film festival, [5] and the Bronze Award at the Columbus International Film & Animation Festival, and was a finalist at the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival.
Marc Levin is an American independent film producer and director. He is best known for his Brick City TV series, which won the 2010 Peabody award and was nominated for an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking and his dramatic feature film, Slam, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 1998. He also has received three Emmy Awards and the 1997 DuPont-Columbia Award.
Todd Wider is an American plastic surgeon and Emmy Award–winning film producer based in New York, who is active in documentary filmmaking.
Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.
Cecilia Peck is an American film producer, director and actress. She is the younger of two children of actor Gregory Peck and his second wife Veronique Passani.
Michael Victor Sporn was an American animator who founded his New York City-based company, Michael Sporn Animation in 1980, and produced and directed numerous animated TV specials and short spots.
Joshua Seftel is an Academy Award-nominated film director. Seftel began his career in documentaries at age 22 with his Emmy-nominated film, Lost and Found, about Romania's orphaned children. He followed this with several films including Stranger at the Gate, an Oscar-nominated short documentary executively produced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. His political campaign film Taking on the Kennedys was selected by Time Magazine as one of the “ten best of the year." Seftel also directed the underdog sports film The Home Team which premiered at SXSW, and a film about the Broadway revival of the musical Annie, It's the Hard Knock Life.
Eric Daniel Metzgar is a filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco.
Jonathan David Stack is an American documentary filmmaker. He is also a co-founder of World Vasectomy Day.
Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story is a 2008 U.S. documentary on the controversial campaign tactics used by Lee Atwater, while working on George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential election campaign, and how those tactics have transformed presidential campaigns in the United States.
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.
Roger Ross Williams is an American director, producer and writer and the first African American director to win an Academy Award (Oscar), with his short film Music by Prudence; this film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2009.
Presumed Guilty is a documentary following Antonio Zúñiga, who was falsely convicted of murder. It holds the box office record for documentary in Mexico, previously held by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. According to The Economist, this is "by far the most successful documentary in Mexico's history." The plot of the film is the attempt by two young Mexican attorneys to exonerate a wrongly convicted man by making a documentary. The film was released theatrically at about the same time the Oscar nominated films such as Black Swan and The King's Speech were being shown on cinema screens in Mexico. It surpassed both of those films at the box office. The film was televised by Televisa on Channel 2 in the fall of 2011.
Freedom Riders is a 2010 American historical documentary film, produced by Firelight Media for PBS American Experience. The film is based in part on the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by historian Raymond Arsenault. Directed by Stanley Nelson, it marked the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride in May 1961 and first aired on May 16, 2011. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film was also featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show program titled, Freedom Riders: 50th Anniversary. Nelson was helped in the making of the documentary by Arsenault and Derek Catsam, an associate professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
Tchavdar Georgiev is an Emmy award winning writer, producer, director and editor of fiction and non-fiction films, TV commercials and television programs both in the USA and abroad.
Tod Lending is an American producer, director, writer and cinematographer. His work has aired on ABC, PBS, HBO, Al Jazeera English, CNN, A&E; has been screened theatrically and awarded at national and international festivals; and has been televised internationally in Europe and Asia. He is the president and founder of Nomadic Pictures, a documentary film production company based in Chicago, and the Executive Director of Ethno Pictures, a nonprofit film company that produces and distributes educational films.
Marion "Muffie" Meyer is an American director, whose productions include documentaries, theatrical features, television series and children’s films. Films that she directed are the recipients of two Emmy Awards, CINE Golden Eagles, the Japan Prize, Christopher Awards, the Freddie Award, the Columbia-DuPont, and the Peabody Awards. Her work has been selected for festivals in Japan, Greece, London, Edinburgh, Cannes, Toronto, Chicago and New York, and she has been twice nominated by the Directors Guild of America.
Nina Rosenblum is an American documentary film and television producer and director and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. Italian Fotoleggendo magazine said Rosenblum “is known in the United States as one of the most important directors of the investigative documentary”.
Connie Field is a director of documentary features.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
Marilyn Ness is a documentary film producer and director based in New York City She is known for social justice documentaries, including Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale (2010), Cameraperson (2016), and most notably, Charm City (2018). Her recent projects include Netflix Original documentary Becoming with Michelle Obama, which was nominated for four Primetime Emmy awards and Netflix Original documentary Dick Johnson is Dead, which was on the Academy Award Shortlist for Best Documentary in 2021. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University.