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Judith Helfand (Director, Producer)Filmmaker, activist and educator Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make them personal, resonant, highly charged, and entertaining. Her films, "The Uprising of '34" (Co-directed with George Stoney), the Sundance award winning "Blue Vinyl" (for which she and Co-Director Daniel Gold were nominated for two Emmy's), and its Peabody award winning "prequel" "A Healthy Baby Girl" (a five-year "video-diary" about her experience with DES related cancer), explore home, class, corporate accountability, intergenerational relationships and the ever shrinking border between what is "personal" and what is a critical part of the public record. Building on a decade of developing innovative outreach and organizing efforts around the distribution of her own films, Helfand co-founded Working Films in 1999, a national organization that is a dynamic bridge between high-profile non-fiction filmmaking and cutting edge social change organizing. More recently Helfand, Julie Parker Benello (Co-Producer on "Blue Vinyl" and SF resident) and Wendy Ettinger (Producer of "The War Room") co-founded and launched Chicken & Egg Pictures and Film Fund. Their goal is to provide small development/we-believe-in-you grants and executive producing services to emerging and veteran women filmmakers producing non-fiction and fiction film projects. Helfand speaks widely and passionately about all of this work in North America and internationally, and is full-time faculty at New York University's Undergraduate School of Film & Television, where she teaches documentary making. Helfand is developing a feature documentary, "Heat Wave: an Unnatural Disaster", about the heat wave that ravaged the city of Chicago in the summer of 1995 leaving 739 people dead - the majority of them old, poor and people of color. |
