Ever since my Dad bought me a Kodak 126 Instamatic© in the 1960s, I’ve been addicted to photography. That little, easy-to-load cartridge film camera gave me a way to interpret the world and capture images forever. I loved it. I snapped away whenever I could. When he installed a splicing machine in our basement for his 16 and 8 mm projects, I tagged along to learn about editing every chance I got. I made my first short comedy sketch on film at around age 12.
"I love making short films that tell great stories..."
Throughout my career as a writer/producer in television, I kept my hobby going in order to continue capturing friends and family on film and video, making personal “life” movies for special events like birthdays, weddings and memorials. On occasion, I videotaped interviews with friend’s parents or captured stories of remarkable strength by those who had survived against many odds. Holocaust survivors, exiles from Cuba, aging New Yorkers who remembered a different world. I create visual stories that capture the way I perceived the world and my family’s place in it, pull at the heartstrings, make us look at the world a little differently.
A few years ago, around the time my mother fell ill, I opened the boxes littering our attic, crammed with cans of film, that we had been lugging around from move to move. I realized I had been sitting on a treasure trove. Years of family history, from 1920 on, had been captured beautifully on film. The digitized result has become the gift that hasn’t stop giving. After producing a short film for my mother's funeral, I began producing more and more “life” films from that material.
And the result was people wanted more.
"Now, I help people with their own life stories and turn them into compelling, heartfelt short films."