Films by Filmmaker

Michal Goldman

Michal Goldman is an Academy-award-winning filmmaker. She has always been especially interested in the relationship between people's ideas and the life-choices they actually make. Michal saw the story of the Allerton Coops as a chance to make a film about the way a militant community of factory workers tried to live its ideals during and after the Great Depression. The fact that these immigrants, most of whom barely spoke English, decided in the 1930s to racially integrate their cooperative, captured her imagination. The film took years to complete, and by the time At Home in Utopia was done, the present had caught up with the past; America was in the midst of its own economic melt down, and we had elected our first African-American president. Michal herself began to learn the craft of documentary filmmaking in the 1960s as an apprentice editor to the Maysles brothers, and then as an assistant to Ed Pincus and David Newman, who were editing Black Natchez, a documentary about Civil Rights organizing in Natchez Mississippi. She spent a long time working on other people's films - including The Exorcist, Caged Heat, and Death Race 2000 - before starting to produce her own work. In addition to At Home in Utopia , her films are A Jumpin' Night in the Garden of Eden, - the first film to document the klezmer revival - Umm Kullthum, A Voice like Egypt - about music and anti-colonialism in the Middle East - and Epiphany in Progress, documenting the first year of a new faith-based inner city school. Michal Goldman is available to present and discuss her work.