Advocating ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Director Diane Weyermann,


“An Inconvenient Truth”, “Citizenfour” and “Food Inc.” In this way, Diane Weyermann, who oversaw the production of powerful documentaries, helped the documentary world move from a serious and underfunded recession of the film industry to a living necessity. – see category, he died on October 14th in a Manhattan nursing home. He was 66 years old.

His sister, Andrea Weyermann, said the cause was lung cancer.

Former vice president and presidential candidate Al Gore, whose seemingly quixotic mission to educate the world on climate change through a decades-long slideshow became an unexpected hit, Al Gore, “Diane was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met,” with the bizarre headline, “The Inconvenient Truth.” ‘ he said in an interview. “He was extremely skilled in his craft and was full of empathy,” she added. “It would be no exaggeration to say that he really changed the world.”

So is the movie. “An Inconvenient Truth” He won an Oscar in 2007 and Mr Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize In the same year, it was shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It became one of the highest-grossing documentaries ever made, the second to be produced by the activist film company Participant, of which Ms. Weyermann was a longtime director and that not many in Hollywood thought was a good idea. It was a movie about a slide show, after all.

When the filmmakers screened the film for a major studio in hopes of distribution, some executives fell asleep. Director Davis Guggenheim recalls, “There was a loud snoring, and when it was over, one of them was like, ‘Nobody’s going to pay a babysitter to go to the theater and watch this movie, but it helps make 10,000 CDs that you can give us science teachers for free.’”

The pessimistic Mr. Guggenheim, Mr. Gore, Mrs. Weyermann, and others went to a steakhouse in Burbank, California, brooding, but Mrs. Weyermann refused to be discouraged.

“Wait until Sundance,” he said.

“An Inconvenient Truth” received four standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival, and Paramount acquired the distribution rights.

Participant It was started in 2004 by social entrepreneur and first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll, with his own mission: to make films about pressing social issues. Ms. Weyermann, a former public interest lawyer, was running the documentary program at the Sundance Institute when Mr. Skoll hired her in 2005, but was worried that Robert Redford, a friend and founder of the institute, would be offended. (He was not and blessed the movement).

“From the beginning, Diane brought knowledge, relationships, context and industry insights to our team,” Mr. Skoll said in an email. “The participant was a small, thriving company at the time, with limited direct film industry expertise, and we had very little documentary experience.”

The participant will go on to produce more than 100 films, including the films “Spotlight”, “Contagion” and “Roma” and the documentaries “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and “The Great Invisible”.

“Diane has put together an incredible roster of movies that make a difference in everything from nuclear weapons to education, the environment, and so much more,” Skoll said. “He was the heart and soul of the Participant.”

It was Ms. Weyermann’s job to find, finance, create and promote documentaries from all over the world, and she traveled constantly to do so.

In 2013, director Laura Poitras “Citizen Four” – the Oscar-winning story of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the government’s rampant surveillance programs, trapped in Berlin when Mrs. Weyermann came to see him.

“Diane knew I wouldn’t be able to travel to the US,” said Ms. Poitras, as she was worried she might be detained or arrested; Mr Snowden had been a fugitive and a lawsuit célèbre during his reporting. “He wanted to make sure I was okay and I wanted him to see the cuts. I had hundreds of hours of film, and I immediately said to him, ‘I can’t provide any documentation,'” – movie studios often require detailed written offers – and he immediately said, ‘We’ll do it and I’m behind you. ‘”

“He loved being in the editing room,” added Ms. Poitras. “He had an incredible ability to watch a movie when it was really raw and to be in tune with the movie and what the producer needed. You asked for his notes; He always made the job better.”

Mr Guggenheim describes him as “a director’s whisperer”.

It wasn’t just the big box office movies he supported, said Ally Derks, the film’s founder. International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “It was the small, fragile films that he also nurtured. was in India. Rahul JainHis film about pollution in New Delhi was screened at Cannes. He was in Siberia with Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky, who made the 2018 movie. “Aquarelle” It has almost no dialogue or people, and takes a gripping look at the water, from a frozen Siberian lake to a waterfall in Venezuela to shattering glaciers in Greenland.

Ms. Weyermann also supported Mr. Kossakovsky’s 2020 film “Gunda,” about a charming Norwegian pig, a film similarly devoid of dialogue (or even people), music, and voice acting. In his review for The New York TimesManohla Dargis described the film as “extremely beautiful and extremely compelling” and said that “funding documentaries like this is heroic,” although funding for films is always difficult.

Diane Hope Weyermann was born on September 22, 1955 in St. He was born in Louis. His father, Andrew, was a Lutheran pastor; his mother, Wilma (Tietjen) Weyermann, was a housewife and later worked for a glassware company.

Diane studied public relations at George Washington University in Washington, graduating in 1977, and earned a law degree from Saint Louis University Law School four years later. He worked as a legal aid attorney before attending film school at Columbia College Chicago, graduating with an MFA in film and video in 1992.

In the same year, his short documentary “Women of Moscow – Echoes of Yaroslavna” about seven Russian women, shot by a Russian and Estonian team, was screened at the Miss Derks festival in Amsterdam. He also made a short film about his father’s hands.

Ms. Weyermann began helping others from making films in 1996 when she became director of the Art and Culture Program of the Open Society Institute, now known as the Open Society Foundation, one of the benefactors of billionaire investor George Soros. He founded the Soros Documentary Fund, which supports international documentaries focusing on social justice issues. When he was hired by the Sundance Institute to set up its documentary film program in 2002, he brought along the Soros Fund. There he set up annual labs for documentary filmmakers where they could work with others on their own films, creating the kind of community documentarians crave.

In addition to her sister Andrea, Ms. Weyermann is survived by a brother, James. Another sister, investigative journalist Debra Weyermann, died in 2013.

When Ms. Weyermann became co-chairman, along with screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski, of the foreign language film category at the 2018 Academy Awards, they promptly changed the name of the category to: “international feature film” He pointed out that the word “foreigner” is not fully inclusive. “Diane has found a way to cut the daily bullshit,” said Mr. Karaszewski.

Inside 2008 interview, Ms. Weyermann was asked if she wanted too much for a movie to make a difference in society.

“When movies are made for just that purpose, lead falls like a balloon,” he replied. “What I love about cinema is that it is a creative medium. It’s not just ‘Let’s focus and educate’, it’s ‘Let’s tell a story, tell it beautifully, tell it poetically. Let’s put that in a not so obvious way.’”



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