FilmsStephen Ives founded Insignia Films in 1988 to pursue his filmmaking interests. Since its inception, the company has been a focus for an impressive array of documentary projects.Ives' first film, Lindbergh, premiered the third season of the PBS series American Experience and has since been rebroadcast a remarkable four times on national public television. After serving as a consulting producer on Ken Burns' series The Civil War and Baseball, Ives then spent the next five years producing and directing the landmark twelve and-one-half-hour, eight-part series The West. This acclaimed history of the American West was the centerpiece of the PBS fall season in 1996, and was seen by more than 38 million people nationwide. Since The West, Ives and Insignia Films have been responsible for the production of two cinema verité films about American arts institutions. The feature-length film Cornerstone, about one of America's most innovative and provocative theatrical ensembles, aired on the HBO network in the fall of 1999. The Amato Opera, Ives' film portrait of the world's smallest opera company, aired nationally on PBS in December of 2001. More recently, Ives and his team at Insignia Films produced the Emmy-winning Seabiscuit, a documentary portrait of the Depression-era thoroughbred champion that aired on the American Experience in 2002, and Reporting America at War, an Emmy-nominated three-hour series about the history of American war correspondence, broadcast nationally on PBS in the fall of 2003. The goals of Insignia Films are to continue to develop a wide-ranging and distinctive body of documentary films, and to develop feature film projects for public television based on American historical stories. Insignia Films is based in New York City. The company regularly co-produces films with the nations leading public television stations, including WETA-TV, Washington, WBGH, Boston, and WNET, New York. |