Q&A with DON’T BLINK – ROBERT FRANK Director Laura Israel & Executive Producer Eugene Jarecki
Thursday, July 28, 8:10 show
Laura Israel cut her teeth editing award-winning commercials and music videos while still a film student at NYU. By the time she graduated she had formed her own editorial company, Assemblage. Her client list included: John Lurie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Sonic Youth, New Order, Ziggy Marley, David Byrne, artists Laurie Simmons and Robert Frank. The films she edited with Frank have screened all over the world and won many awards. WINDFALL, her debut doc, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, won top prize at Doc NYC, received a NY Times Critics Pick and Ms. Israel was named in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”.
Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning documentary director and producer. After directing The Trials of Henry Kissinger in 2002, Jarecki won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Peabody Award for his 2005 film Why We Fight. In 2010, he created Move Your Money, a viral short encouraging Americans to move their money from “too big to fail” banks to community banks. His Emmy-award winning 2011 film, Reagan, premiered at Sundance before broadcasting on HBO. His most recent film, The House I Live In, about America’s War on Drugs, once again won him Grand Jury Prize honors at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival as well as another Peabody Award. He executive produced the Sundance award winning documentary (T)error and is currently acting as executive producer on Denial, which will air on PBS this year. Most recently in 2016 Jarecki directed an episode of Amazon’s The New Yorker Presents entitled El Cyclist which looks at U.S. - Cuban relations on a endearingly personal and intimate level.