Frederick Marx
Directing
Biography
Frederick Marx is an internationally acclaimed, Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker, director, writer, and editor with over 45 years in the film industry. He gained international recognition for co-writing and editing the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994), which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first documentary ever chosen to close the New York Film Festival. The film was named Best Film of the Year by critic Roger Ebert and was later added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Marx was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year in 1994, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995, and was honored with a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. He is the founder of Warrior Films, a nonprofit production company based in Oakland, California, dedicated to creating films that address social issues and promote healing and transformation.
Known For
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
Hoop Dreams
Jean, a small-town child preacher grows up in an institution without speaking. When involuntarily released, he ends up in an abandoned motel where he meets Cory – a “hard knocks” woman. Together they embark on a strange journey of healing.
The Unspoken
An educational companion piece to Hoop Dreams, Higher Goals features NBA star Isiah Thomas in a fast-paced, entertaining PBS special that encourages young athletes to put their dreams of professional sports in perspective and focus on getting an education.
Higher Goals
A former drug runner must rescue her kidnapped son from his father.
Tangled
Zanskar is one of the last remaining original Tibetan Buddhist societies with a continuous untainted lineage dating back thousands of years. In nearby Tibet and Ladakh, in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Nepal, traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture is either dead already or dying. The horror of Chinese government design in Tibet is being matched by the destruction of global economics elsewhere. Zanskar, ringed by high Himalayan mountains in northwest India, one of the most remote places on the planet, has been safe until now. But that’s changing. As economic growth descends on Zanskar it will bring with it an end to this unbroken Buddhist social tradition. Will the native language, culture, and religious practice be able to survive?
Journey from Zanskar
Dreams from China, shot from 1983-85 while working in Tianjin and Beijing, is a highly lyrical, diary-like film essay, lending perspective to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. "Extremely sincere...presenting a paradox of Chinese politics and society." (New York Times)
Dreams from China
"You are not fit to be a citizen of the United States," said a U.S. Representative to Werner Marx, German-Jewish refugee, distinguished sailor in the U.S. Navy during WWII, American Communist -- as he tried to have him de-naturalized in a hearing of the House Committee of UnAmerican Activities. House of UnAmerican Activities draws on a wealth of family archives (stills, home movies, documents, and a video interview with the filmmaker's mother), as the filmmaker searches for the father he never really knew and for the meaning of a troubled era.
House of UnAmerican Activities
On Black Mountain takes place at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in the hills north of San Francisco, CA. 22 women Veterans experience a 4-month mindfulness meditation-based workshop to confront and face the demons from their military service: of sexual harassment, rape, and abuse, gender and race discrimination, career exploitation, and the lies and hypocrisy from their commanders.
Veterans Journey Home: On Black Mountain
"A masterpiece of compilation film" (Berlin Kinemathek), Dream Documentary uses footage from other films to create a surreal and foreboding societal landscape
Dream Documentary
They survived war, yet over the years, U.S. military veterans from four generations must find their own unique bridge of connection in order to survive and thrive back home.