Brigitte Berman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brigitte Berman | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Berman in 2009 | |
| Born | 1951 (age 74–75) West Germany |
| Education | Queen's University, Kingston |
| Occupation | Documentary filmmaker |
| Notable work | Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got (1985) |
Brigitte Berman (born 1951) is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, most noted for her 1985 film Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got.[1]
Originally from West Germany, she moved to Canada with her family in childhood and studied film at Queen's University.[2]
She joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a researcher in the early 1970s, later becoming a creator of television documentaries for the network's documentary series Take 30.[2]
Film career
Her first theatrical documentary film, Bix: Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet,[3] was a profile of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke and was released in 1982.[4]
Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got was released in 1985.[5] The film, which profiled American clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw, was a Genie Award nominee for Best Feature Length Documentary at the 7th Genie Awards in 1986,[6] and a co-winner with Down and Out in America of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 59th Academy Awards in 1987.[7]
She subsequently enrolled at the Canadian Film Centre as part of its inaugural class in 1987.[8]
In 1994, her narrative feature debut, The Circle Game, premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival.[9]
In the mid-1990s, Shaw sued Berman on the grounds that as Time Is All You've Got had become more critically and commercially successful than had been expected, he was entitled to receive a greater share of the film's profits than he had originally agreed to in the 1980s.[10] His lawsuit was dismissed in Ontario Superior Court in 1997.[11]
She subsequently directed a number of television films before returning to documentary filmmaking in the late 2000s with Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel (2009).[12] She also later released the Gordon Pinsent documentary The River of My Dreams in 2016,[13] and Hugh Hefner's After Dark: Speaking Out in America in 2018.[14]
