Don Schwartz Spotlight on Documentaries
Welcome to the Blog of actor/journalist/personal historian Don Schwartz.
Don has been published in a variety of publications since 1977. His book, Telling Their Own Stories: Conversations with Documentary Filmmakers, is available from Amazon in softback or Kindle edition.
Don holds multiple degrees, including a Ph.D. in psychology and counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Don is a regular guest on our web radio show, The Art of Film Funding, produced by From the Heart Productions, reviewing documentary films with founder Carole Dean—http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-art-of-film-funding
Don also contributes film reviews and filmmaker profiles to CineSource Magazine online—www.CineSourceMagazine.com
His weekly film review appears in The Marin Post—https://marinpost.org/
You can access Don’s Personal Historian services at:
https://donschwartzservices.com/
The Art of the Steal is an elaborate game of Clue, only instead of figuring out who murdered who, with what weapon, in which room; it’s who destroyed one man’s beatific vision, with what tactics, in which jurisdiction?
The film opens with these words: “In 1922 Albert C. Barnes, M.D., created the Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion,
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Released theatrically in 2014, Particle Fever documents the search for ‘the God particle’—the Higgs boson, the discovery of which would ‘explain everything’—at the Swiss-based Large Hadron Collider.
Like Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and every biographical, historical, and biblical movie ever made, we know the end of Partic
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I’m not a critic. I don’t criticize films, I review them. And I only review a film if, for any one reason, I recommend it. With rare exception, I review only documentary films. I review them because I hold the conviction that our world will be a better place if and when very large numbers of people see and respond to these films.
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a woman like that is a dual focus documentary primarily focusing on the life and work of 17th century Italian female artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
The secondary focus is on the film’s maker, Ellen Weissbrod who introduces her film by telling of her 30-year career making other people’s ideas, and o
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9000 Needles is a simple, straight-forward story which has a profound 
impact on the viewer – and equally profound implications about our American healthcare system.
It is the story of Devin Dearth.
The film’s website introduces Dearth’s life elegantly. “At forty years old, Devin Dearth is a succ
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San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker Mark Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties) begins A Fierce Green Fire with this introduction: "The environmental movement is about nature versus humanity. It arose at a time when our industrial civilization has grown so powerful, it threatens the natural world on which we depend for survival. It has become the battle for a living planet."
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War Photographer is Christian Frei’s portrait of veteran photojournalist James Natchwey who covers wars, poverty and other places of strife. Frie’s camera follows Natchwey on assignment
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