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Key Personnel:

Producer

Writer

Editor

Cinematographer

 

Amanda Pollak
Producer

Amanda Pollak has been producing, researching and writing highly acclaimed documentaries for Public Television since 1992. Her investigative skills were rewarded early on when she received an individual Emmy for her leading role in researching TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt, which the New York Daily News proclaimed to be "one of public television's proudest achievements." Since then, she has continued to research and produce compelling historical films, including the Emmy Award-winning Truman and Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided. During the latter film’s production, she took exclusive charge of over forty days of Hollywood-style production, traveling across the country to nearly twenty states. Following this effort she delved into the history of world commerce with the movie Money and Power: The History of Business. The New York Times called this two-hour documentary "smart and well-edited," and went on to laud the film's extensive displays of long-forgotten archival material from the 1500s to the 1900s. In 2002, she revealed her ability to work in different genres by winning an Emmy Award for producing one hour of David Grubin's five-hour scientific series for PBS entitled The Secret Life of the Brain. Well received by public and critics alike, New York Newsday named it "provocative, and a triumph" and The Los Angeles Times asserted "the content breaks new ground." Following this, Pollak returned to her specialty, historical narrative, by joining Insignia Films to produce Reporting America at War. Heralded as “uncommonly intelligent and provocative television” by the Washington Post, Reporting America at War earned a Cine Golden Eagle Award and was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2004 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. With Insignia Films, she then went on to produce Las Vegas, which followed New York and Chicago on PBS’s acclaimed history series, American Experience. Las Vegas received wide national praise, noted as being “well-produced, brightly written and entertaining” by the San Jose Mercury News and “thorough and amplifying history” by the Dallas Morning News. It became the highest rated American Experience program of 2005. Her most recent work was on New Orleans, a two-hour history of the city presented in the aftermath of Katrina, which aired on the American Experience in February of 2007.

 

 

Michelle Ferrari
Writer

Over the past decade, Emmy-winning screenwriter Michelle Ferrari has created a series of innovative and critically-acclaimed documentary narratives. Most recently, she completed Insignia Films¹ Reporting America at War, a three-hour series for PBS that the Washington Post called "uncommonly intelligent and provocative television." She was also the writer of Seabiscuit, director Stephen Ives' profile of the Depression-era thoroughbred champion for American Experience was variously praised as "essential viewing," "superior television," and a "wire-to-wire winner." Ferrari¹s work, in particular, was hailed by critics as "sleek" and "notably stylish," and earned her the 2003 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing. She was the writer of the American Experience installment Miss America, which premiered as an Official Selection of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and of Out of the Past, winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. Other credits include the PBS special Margaret Sanger, nominated for the prestigious Writers Guild of America Award in 1999, and Calling the Ghosts, which in 1998 received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Special. Ferrari also has served as story editor and creative advisor on numerous documentaries, including Beauty in a Jar, State of Denial, T-Shirt Travels, Bombay Eunuch, Paving the Way and HBO¹s Emmy-nominated Blue Vinyl. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and holds an M.A. in American History from Columbia University, where she was a President¹s Fellow.

 

Toby Shimin
Editor

For the past ten years, Toby Shimin has shown an uncanny ability to take complex, often controversial subjects, and craft them into elegant and emotional films. Her most recent work can be seen in Episode Two of Ives' Reporting America at War, and in Seabiscuit, for which Shimin received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Editing. As the sole editor of Ives' and Kantor's film Cornerstone, she combed through more than 300 hours of footage to create a tightly structured, fast-paced documentary about one of America's most unusual theatrical ensembles. Her work editing A Leap of Faith about the struggle to create a school in Northern Ireland for both Catholic and Protestant children, and Martha and Ethel, a surprising and moving portrait of two ninety-year-old nannies and the lifelong relationship with the families they raised, contributed greatly to the acceptance of both of these films in the Sundance Film Festival, and their later success in theatrical release and on PBS. Her other films ­ from the story of Bluegrass music, to a portrait of Neil Simon, to the story of one family's struggle with their history during the holocaust ­ have all displayed Shimin's characteristic deft touch with complex and deeply personal stories.

 

Buddy Squires
Cinematographer

Buddy Squires is one of the premiere documentary cameramen in the country. His award-winning cinematography has formed the centerpiece of a generation of historical films, from Ives' films The West and Lindbergh, to The Civil War, Baseball, Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty with Ken Burns. His remarkable work capturing Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees in Tanzania garnered the HBO film Chimps: So Like Us an Emmy award and an Academy Award nomination. He has filmed baseball pitchers with high speed cameras, open heart surgery in operating rooms, and street performers in New York City. Squires has shot in the jungles of Central America for Guatemala: The Official Story (Canadian Broadcasting), in Southeast Asia for The Khmer Rouge (TF-1 France), and in the mountains of India for a profile of the Dalai Lama.

 

 

 

 

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