Enjoy lunch in Los Angeles or via Zoom with Kirby Dick, a two-time Emmy award-winning and two-time Academy award-nominated filmmaker behind some of the most groundbreaking documentaries today with his creative partner Amy Ziering.
He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival. Many of his films have directly impacted American politics and culture, resulting in real-world change. Dick’s latest project, Not So Pretty (2022), is a four-part investigation-driven exploration of the lurking dangers in the commodities we all use every day without question for makeup, skin-care, nails, and hair. His previous series, Allen v. Farrow (2021), is a seven-time Emmy nominated series that goes beyond the headlines of Hollywood’s most notorious scandal: the accusation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen involving his then seven-year-old daughter with Mia Farrow.
On the Record (2020), was a searing look at the intersection of issues relating to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. The Invisible War (2012) exposed the epidemic of rape in the US military leading dozens of policy reforms signed into law. The Hunting Ground (2015) created a national discussion of sexual assault on college campuses and sparked sweeping reforms at hundreds of institutions. The Bleeding Edge (2018) unearthed the fast-growing medical device industry’s corruption and malfeasance, resulted in Bayer and Johnson & Johnson pulling dangerous products off the market.
He also directed Twist of Faith, the story of a man confronting the trauma of his past sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, which was also nominated for an Academy Award. Other films include Outrage, nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a breakthrough investigation of the MPAA's secretive film ratings system, and Derrida, a complex portrait of the world-renowned French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
He is the 2012 recipient of the Nestor Almendros Prize for Courage and Filmmaking and the 2013 Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize. Dick's work often focuses on issues of secrecy, hypocrisy, and human sexuality. Many of his films explore subjects and issues that have traditionally been taboo, such as homosexuality, sadomasochism, and sexual abuse.
In Variety, Owen Gleiberman called Dick a "a deadly earnest but instinctively dramatic filmmaker." Ryan Stewart of Cinematical wrote, "Kirby Dick has been compared to photographer Diane Arbus in the way he prefers to open the camera lens to the pained, the freakish and the inexplicable that exists on the margins of everyday life." Dick often employs intricately edited montages that blend together television news clips, archival footage, music videos, documentary interviews, and other sources.
Beginning with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, he has also pioneered applying the "fair use" doctrine to appropriate copyrighted footage without obtaining licenses or compensating rights holders. Dick often employs a cinéma vérité style. He has said that he prefers to work this way because it allows for a more complex relationship with his subjects. In many cases, Dick has also encouraged his subjects to record their own footage, which is then incorporated into his film. Critics have increasingly remarked on the impact of his films as investigative journalism, with The New York Times' A. O. Scott writing, "Kirby Dick has become one of the indispensable muckrakers of American cinema, zeroing in on frequently painful stories about how power functions in the absence or failure of accountability" and Entertainment Weekly including three of his films on its list of documentaries that have "changed the world".
Ziering and Dick became the first filmmakers to partner with Vanity Fair for a groundbreaking multimedia project on sexual harassment during the Old Hollywood studio system in the March 2022 issue.
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