I am a filmmaker…

In my teens I crafted action capers and personal reveries with a super-8 camera and tape splicer. In graduate school I studied the canon of avant garde cinema and chained myself to a flatbed editing table — exploring the dark alchemy of the cut. 

With an MFA in hand, but a desire to make a living at what I love, I segued from experimental film to documentaries. (I’m not sure how I thought this would generate a living, but miraculously it has). As most of us do, I cut my teeth producing, directing, shooting & editing whatever came down the pike; but I have been blessed to spend the last several decades making social-issue docs that move viewers to tears, laughter and action.

The dirty little secret of documentaries is that post-production is “the room where it happens.” With a mountain of footage and no script, meaning is created via thousands of decisions large and small. In 2010 I started to focus exclusively on editing – motivated by the power of the craft, as well as fatigue with the self-promotion entailed in producing/directing. 

Orson Welles called RKO studios “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.” A desktop computer loaded with AVID software is a more modest playlot to be sure. But there is great pleasure and power in orchestrating story, music, light, geometry, sound, word, and gesture, into a collective dream.  Film is the seventh art, the one that combines all the others. It can change our minds, and change our world.