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:
Born and raised in New York City, arrested a couple times, maybe more, and with a difficult family background, Matt Weber found meaning and passion with photography – street photography, to be specific – with a film camera rather than digital, and in black and white.
Produced and directed by Dan Wechsler, More Than the Rainbow focuses on Weber’s work as well as t
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When Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre was released in 1981, the film asked and answered the question: Can two guys talking at dinner make a movie? The answer, of course, was 'yes.' I was as surprised as the next guy to find myself enraptured by Wallace Shawn's and Andre Gregory's conversation.
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Although I was raised in the American South, I never felt more like what Fran Lebowitz calls a ‘hillbilly’ – her term for New York tourists – until I watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary about this writer/speaker/actor I’d never heard of before seeing this HBO film.
Since Lebowitz was brand new to me, I have no idea if you, dear reader, know her work. In either case, you may
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With exquisite cinematography, Queen of the Sun tells us about and shows us the magnificent virtues of honeybees, our destruction of them, and the attempts by many noble members of our species to save them.
The multiple answers to one of the film’s taglines, “What are the bees telling us?” can be qu
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Narrated by Forest Whitaker, Rising from Ashes is a story of reconciliation – the creation of the first Rwandan National Cycling Team. The film follows the team’s six years of training and development concluding with their ‘riders’ competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
There’s another story – that of Jock Boyer. His
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Initially presented by HBO, first-time feature director Matthew Akers' Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present is a broad biographical outline of the legendary performance artist.
The impetus for the production was a 40-year retrospective of Abramovic's work at The Museum of Modern Art, in 2010, in New York. The three-month exhibition included a new piece called "The Arti
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Produced by Mick Jagger – who also appears in this HBO documentary – and directed by the well-lauded Alex Gibney, Mr. Dynamite tells James Brown’s story from his birth in South Carolina, through the early loss of his parents, his impoverished childhood, years of imprisonment for stealing clothes out of a car, into his professional career as a performer.
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If there was an Academy Award category for best culinary documentary film – which there should be – The Raw and the Cooked would be a winner.
Prolific, if not legendary, documentary filmmaker Monica Treut, tours Taiwan, filming and enjoying a great variety of cuisine – their dishes’ preparation, presentation, and consumption. Her cinematography is
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Breath Made Visible is a documentary film about dancer Anna Halprin.
I am biased. I have a tangential relationship with this documentary’s subject.
I moved to San Francisco in 1975, right in the middle of the human potential movement’s heyday. There were as many groups and methods of self-improvement and spiritual realization then as there are social networking websites now. Anna’s 
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Ferlinghetti is a whirlwind romp through the life and times of legend-in-his-lifetime Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Most often connected with the 1950s birth of the ‘beat generation,’ the man rises above and beyond any one biographical reference.
Ferlinghetti is an accomplished poet, painter, writer, publisher, political activist, cultural catalyst, and
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