History Film Forum
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Lynn Novick

Filmmaker

Lynn Novick is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker. For nearly 30 years, she has been producing and directing films about American history and culture, among them some of the most acclaimed and top-rated documentaries to have aired on PBS. Her films include Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, and The War, a seven part, fifteen hour exploration of ordinary Americans’ experiences in World War Two.

The Vietnam War, Novick’s newest project co-directed by long-time partner Ken Burns, produced by Sarah Botstein and written by Geoffrey C. Ward, airs on PBS in September 2017. An immersive, ten part, 18 hour epic, it is the first major documentary assessment in a generation of one of the most divisive and consequential events in American history. A groundbreaking 360 degree exploration of the war, the series features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from the winning and losing sides.

Novick is currently working on a two-part biography of Ernest Hemingway, co-directed by Burns and slated for completion in 2020, and College Behind Bars, (working title) a feature length documentary produced by Sarah Botstein about a group of men and women imprisoned for serious crimes in New York State, struggling to earn degrees in a rigorous liberal arts college program – the Bard Prison Initiative. College Behind Bars asks several essential questions: What is prison for?  Who in America has access to educational opportunity? Can we have justice without redemption? The film will air on PBS in 2018.


Events

Saturday, March 11th, 2017
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11:00 a.m. - Warner Bros. Theater

Across the top-grossing 1,100 films that debuted between 2002 and 2012, only 4.4% were created by female directors. As a study by Dr. Stacy Smith of the USC Annenberg school discovered, of 129 top grossing G, PG, and PG-13 films theatrically released between 2006 and 2011 less than 30% of all on screen speaking characters are girls or women. The ratio of males to females on the silver screen is 2.53 to 1. These statistics highlight a major problem in the world of filmmaking: the limited ability of women and women’s stories to be seen or told. This panel will bring together female experts in the industry to discuss the unique challenges faced by female filmmakers, and the impact this has on historical filmmaking.