Production

Production Team | Advisory Committee | Audience & Distribution | Fundraising & Budget| Project Structure

 

Production Team

Jake Boritt(Writer/Director/Producer/Camera) is currently completing his second feature documentary: 759: Boy Scouts of Harlem.  It will premiere at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in March.  He is also in post-post production on the doc Harlem 11/4: Obama Wins, a cinema verite portrait of Harlem on the day  Barack Obama was elected as the first black president. It recently screened as a work-in-progress at the Maysles Institute. Jake's first feature, Budapest to Gettysburg, was selected for the 2007 IFP Independent Film Week in New York and screened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, numerous other locations and was a finalist for PBS' POV series. He recently completed Cooking to Live, for Project Gaia, filmed in Ethiopia's Ogaden Desert at a U.N. refugee camp on the Somali border.

 

“So young a filmmaker with so mature a grasp of history is a promising sign for the rising generation of documentarians.”

  
Director Ronald Maxwell
Gettysburg and Gods and Generals

Jake served as Associate Producer on Rory Kennedy and Liz Garbus' Moxie-Firecracker production The Homestead Strike, part of the Emmy-winning History Channel series 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. Jake worked as a producer/cinematographer/researcher with Emmy winners Sarah Teale on productions for HBO, A&E, AMC and CourtTV and on David Grubin's Young Doctor Freud and Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm (PBS). Ken Burns called Boritt's first documentary Beyond Gettysburg: Adams County USA (Public Television-WITF) “a really good film.”

 

In 2002, he wrote, produced, directed and shot a historical documentary on the Gettysburg area titled Adams County USA, which aired on public television, screened at National Geographic and is currently used in schools (AdamsCountyUSA.com). Ken Burns said, “Jake Boritt has made a really good film. His direction is sure, confidence pours from every cut, and the stories he tells are stories I want to hear. Mr. Boritt proves impressively that all good history is local. Bravo.” Also in 2002, Boritt worked with David Grubin, helping research and produce two films, Young Doctor Freud and Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University. He has received a NEH Younger Scholars history grant and was raised on a historic farm in Gettysburg. He lives in New York City.
 
 
Ira Meistrich(Editor) has worked in documentary film for more than thirty years. His work has aired on all three major networks, as well as PBS, Discovery, and A&E, among others. His work has received one Emmy Award and five Emmy nominations. Among his credits are The Soros Foundation’s A Sentence of Their Own, awarded a 2001 Cine Golden Eagle Award; Answering Children’s Questions, a Peter Jennings Special following the 9/11 attacks, which won a 2002 duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award, and the groundbreaking Right Here, Right Now, a multipart independent video-diary series for WGBH/American Documentary, Inc. He is currently completing Something Abides, a full-length documentary about modern-day Gettysburg. He worked with Jake Boritt as post-production supervisor and editor for Adams County USA and the recently completed A&E documentary Crime Ink.
Jay Ungar and Molly Mason (Music) are extraordinary musicians. If you didn't know it before, you sure did after Ken Burns' The Civil War hit the airwaves. Their performance of Jay's haunting composition Ashokan Farewell — the musical hallmark of the PBS series — earned the couple international acclaim. The soundtrack won a Grammy and Ashokan Farewell — originally inspired by Jay & Molly's annual fiddle and dance camps — was nominated for an Emmy.

Since joining forces in the late 1970s, Jay and Molly have become one of the most celebrated duos on the American acoustic music scene. With their comfortable sense of fun and their love of music, they make each concert a musical journey — sometimes spanning two continents and two centuries. Their incomparable warmth and wit — coupled with consummate musicianship — have delighted audiences worldwide.

Listen to the timeless renditions of hard-driving Appalachian, Cajun and Celtic fiddle tunes, stirring Civil War classics, sassy songs from the golden age of swing and country, stunning waltzes, and deeply moving original compositions. It's immediately apparent why Jay and Molly concerts warm the heart, feed the soul, and appeal to all ages. No wonder they continue to receive widespread critical praise.

They've garnered legions of fans through their appearances on Great Performances, A Prairie Home Companion, their own public radio specials, and work on film soundtracks such as Brother's Keeper, Legends of the Fall, and a host of Ken Burns documentaries. www.jayandmolly.com
Dr. László Ritter (Historical Consultant) is a historian, author and documentary film maker who worked as a researcher and interviewer in Hungary for Budapes to Gettysburg, Blessed is the Match and other documentaries. He is a research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. imdb
Klára Trencsényi (Camera) A graduate Director of Photography of the Hungarian Film School (SZFE) in Budapest I have worked on several documentary and feature projects. Her latest documentary project was the IDFA awarded The Angelmakers, with Dutch director Astrid Bussink. Previously she worked on several visual anthropology projects in Western Ukraine, as well as photographing a documentary on a new neo-Nazi movement led by a 26-year-old Hungarian girl. She is also doing research for a documentary on matrilinearity in Ghana and preparing another project on a minority group of Hungarian language speakers in Moldova, Romania.