The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the film industry. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Academy Awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment industry in the United States and worldwide. The Oscar statuette depicts a knight rendered in the Art Deco style.
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.
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 1982 novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist 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.
Maximilian Schell was an Austrian-born Swiss actor, who also wrote, directed and produced some of his own films. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood.
Sarah Ellen Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, political activist and retired actress. She first garnered attention as a child actress for her role as Ramona Quimby in the television series Ramona, based on Beverly Cleary's books. Subsequently this led to her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996). She has starred in many feature films, including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Guinevere (1999), Go (1999), The Weight of Water (2000), No Such Thing (2001), My Life Without Me (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Splice (2009), and Mr. Nobody (2009).
Herz is a German surname meaning heart. Notable people with the surname include:
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Sommer is a surname, from the German, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages word for the season "summer".
One Survivor Remembers is a 1995 documentary short film by Kary Antholis.
Gerda Weissmann Klein was a Polish-born American writer and human rights activist. Her autobiographical account of the Holocaust, All but My Life (1957), was adapted for the 1995 short film, One Survivor Remembers, which received an Academy Award and an Emmy Award, and was selected for the National Film Registry. She married Kurt Klein (1920–2002) in 1946.
Alice Herz-Sommer, also known as Alice Herz, was a Czech-born Israeli classical pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before migrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and at the age of 110 was the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized as such.
Inheritance is a 2006 American documentary film about Monika Hertwig, also known as Monika Christiane Knauss, the daughter of Ruth Irene Kalder and Amon Göth, commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp. Monika Hertwig was 10 months old when her father was hanged in 1946 for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. She discovered the truth about him only as a young adult, because her own mother told her in childhood that he was a good man and a war hero. The film centers around her meeting a Holocaust survivor, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, who was interned at Płaszów and personally knew Göth.
Malcolm Clarke is an English documentary film maker. He began his career at the BBC, directing everything from the nightly news and documentaries, to game shows and music programming. He is now working for ARTeFACT Entertainment, a media company located in Shanghai, China, founded by Chinese producer Han Yi.
Nicholas Reed is a British documentary film producer, media, entertainment and technology entrepreneur, with interests in film finance, viral video marketing, motion picture and television production. Reed and fellow producer Malcolm Clarke won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the 2013 film The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.
"Til It Happens to You" is a song produced and performed by American singer Lady Gaga. She co-wrote the song with Diane Warren for the 2015 documentary film The Hunting Ground, which deals with campus rape in the United States. The song had leaked onto the Internet through an unofficial recording made at the film's premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. It was later released by Interscope Records to digital retailers on September 18, 2015. The director and producer of the film had looked for someone influential to write a song for it, and music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg contacted Warren, who was interested. She wrote the song with Gaga and producer Nile Rodgers accompanied them during the recording, providing his suggestions.
Yisrael Kristal was a Polish-Israeli supercentenarian recognized in 2014 as the oldest living Holocaust survivor. After the death of Yasutaro Koide, of Japan, on 18 January 2016, he was also recognized as the oldest living man in the world as well as one of the ten oldest men ever at his death at age 113 years and 330 days.
Joe's Violin is a 2016 American short documentary film directed by Kahane Cooperman, and produced by Kahane Cooperman and Raphaela Neihausen, that follows a moment in the life of a Polish survivor of the Holocaust from the time he decides to drop off his 70-year-old violin during a local instrument drive through the violin's acquisition by a new owner, a 12-year-old girl from the Bronx, and recounts how the experience changes both their lives.
Frank Stiefel is an American filmmaker and photographer. His film Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject.
