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:
A ‘cordillera’ is an extensive chain of mountains or mountain ranges. Mountain ranges of this type have a complex structure, usually the result of folding and faulting accompanied by volcanic activity. In South America the ranges include numerous volcanic peaks.
The definition above is of a generic noun. Legendary writer/director Patricio Guzmán capitalizes the ‘C’ because he is referring to the specific Cordillera in his home country of Chile
...Read More
Written and directed by Thomas D. Herman, and narrated by Sam Waterston, Dateline-Saigon profiles the work of five Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who, as young, naive men, found themselves in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in Vietnam. The five are: Peter Arnett, Malcolm Browne, David Halberstam, Horst Faas, and Neil
...Read More
“When I look out this window which had been chewed by polar bears, both from the outside and inside, I think maybe I belong to the last generation who will see a polar bear walking on the ice outside.”
Asgeir Helgestad
Asgeir Helgestad is a prolific, multi-talented wildlife cameraman from Norway. For more than 20 years his second home—and the location of this film’s production—has been on Svalbard, a group of islands between Norway and the North Po
...Read More
Directed and shot by Daniel Traub, with music by Simon Taufique, Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own introduces the artist, her life’s path, and her sensational work—all in under an hour.
The film’s website describes von Rydingsvard as one of the few women in the world working in ‘monumental sc
...Read More
“Before bringing me to meet her family in Italy, my mother told me, ‘you will find out who you really are.’”
Matteo Troncone
Had my mentor David Hakim not shared arrangiarsi: Pizza... and the Art of Living I would have never experienced the joy of Matteo Troncone’s cinematic ode to
...Read More
Aaron Weisblatt’s Land of Little Rivers introduces the worlds of trout fly fishing. In a very short 90 minutes the film introduces a growing community of people dedicated to this particular approach to fishing—one which demands hard-earned expertise and infinite patience, along with therapeutic benefits.
From th
...Read More
“It took me years to understand how deeply the Peace Corps experience affected my ability to be a good journalist. It was in the Peace Corps that I really learned empathy.”
Maureen Orth, Journalist
A Towering Task is exactly what the film’s subtitle suggests, a history of the United States’ Peace Corps. I wond
...Read More
“Frequently, when they come to the office they say, I want my migraine cured. I would look at them and say, If I can cure your migraine, I’m going to get the Nobel Prize. That’s how big that is.”
Dr. Allan Purdy, Prof. of Neurology, Dalhousie University
Written, directed, and narrated by Susanna Styron, Out of My Head<
...Read More
“If they’re given a command that might put their person in harm’s way, they have to make the decision to not take that command. Every other service dog is trained to take commands no matter what.”
Pick of the Litter is an introduction to the work of Guide Dogs for the Blind which trains dogs, and
...Read More
“The new generation is fascinated with obsolete technology. They’ve grown up with extendible fingers, Game Boy, texting—and here’s letterpress? You betcha.”
Paul Brown, letterpress printer
For a little more than four hundred years printing was done by a process called ‘letterpress.’ Good ol’ Johannes Gutenberg<
...Read More