Yoav Potash is an American writer and filmmaker whose works include the documentaries Crime After Crime and Food Stamped .
Yoav Potash is an American writer and filmmaker whose works include the documentaries Crime After Crime and Food Stamped .
Potash produced and directed the film Crime After Crime, about the legal battle to free Deborah Peagler from a California prison. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win dozens of awards in the US and abroad. Potash produced the documentary over a five and a half year span, an experience he wrote about for The Wall Street Journal. [1] The film was broadcast on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, as part of the OWN Documentary Club. Awards the film has received include the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, [2] The National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award, [3] The Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism, [4] and over 20 other top honors for documentaries in the US and abroad. [5] The film was a New York Times Critics' Pick. [6]
Potash's film Food Stamped documents the challenges of eating healthy on a food stamp budget. The film won the Jury Prize at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on Pivot, Participant Media's satellite and cable network. [7] "Food Stamped" was also an official selection of Whole Foods Market’s online film festival, Do Something Reel. [8] and was featured on CNN Money. [9]
In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Potash is currently working to adapt Crime After Crime into a dramatic major motion picture. [10] In 2013, Potash's screenplay for that project ranked in the top 1% of over 3,000 dramatic scripts entered in the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition. [11] That same year, Potash was selected to participate in the Film Independent Producing Lab to further develop the dramatic adaptation project. [12]
In 2018, Potash was selected as a filmmaker-in-residence at the Jewish Film Institute in San Francisco to produce two documentary films on untold stories of the Holocaust, entitled The Remembered and Diary from the Ashes. [13]
Potash earned a 2018 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism from The American Jewish Press Association [14] for his personal essay entitled "How I learned all Israelis are not my father," published by J, The Jewish News of Northern California. [15] Potash has also written articles about his filmmaking experiences for publications including The Wall Street Journal [16] IndieWire, [17] Videomaker, [18] The Sundance Institute [19] and TheWrap. [20]
Potash, Jewish, was raised by a Jewish, Israeli father and an American Jewish mother. [21]