Dan Weissman Email & Phone Number

My work in film and video includes directing (and/or shooting, editing, writing, producing) Emmy-winning documentaries and theatrically released and broadcast feature docs, both in the U.S. and internationally.I studied film and media at Brown University, RISD, Columbia University, and NYU. While in college, I worked on the French studio and American location shoots for "Providence," directed by Alain Resnais; five years later, I co-wrote the script for a documentary narrated by Orson Welles.My first film as director and co-producer, "The Precious Legacy," won Emmys for writing and editing and was nominated for cinematography, and played festivals worldwide. Produced for a Smithsonian exhibition and broadcast on PBS, it tells the history of the Jews of Czechoslovakia as revealed through artifacts residing in the Jewish Museum in Prague. My second documentary was invited to the Berlinale: "Terezín Diary," a feature I directed and produced, tells the story of the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. First Run Features opened it theatrically and distributed it domestically. It was broadcast on PBS and in Europe, and won awards internationally.My comprehensive, years-long documentation of performance artist Spalding Gray’s trailblazing work is showcased in Steven Soderbergh's "And Everything Is Going Fine." I produced Julie Talen’s "60 Cameras Against the War," an experimental work about antiwar protests, and, over the course of twenty years, filmed a portrait of an unstoppable, seminal figure in alt- and indie music, singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh and her band, Throwing Muses.My current production, "Saving Strangers," concerns Volker Heinz, who, at the height of the Cold War, risked having his life destroyed to smuggle more than sixty people to freedom from oppression under East Germany’s totalitarian regime, two at a time, over many months. He was twenty-two. Nobody made him do it. The scheme was audacious and dangerous in the extreme, but he kept it going and it worked - until it didn’t.He faced the consequences of his moral choice when he was captured and imprisoned by the secret police. How and why he positioned himself at the center of the plot, despite the known risk of its eventual failure, poses a question: Why do certain people help total strangers when they know it will put them squarely in harm’s way? What are the roots of such altruism? And, what might the rest of us take from their example?I’ve received grants from NYSCA and the NEH/NYFA, am a Trustee of the Winston Preparatory School, and am a lifelong member of SMPTE.