CITY HALL

An American filmmaker born on January 1st, 1930, in Boston, Frederick Wiseman graduated from the Yale Law School in 1954. From his first documentary film, Titicut Follies in 1967, Wiseman has used the same technique for all his films: no interviews, narration or additional music. He edits the films himself and it usually takes 12 months. Wiseman has made 43 documentary films that form a mosaic portrait of contemporary society as seen in institutions that are common in all societies. He considers his work a single film lasting more than 100 hours over 54 years, to date.

Frederick Wiseman directed a fiction film, The Last Letter in 2002.  He has directed two plays at the Comedie Francaise: Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and The Last Letter, based on a chapter from Vasily Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate which he also directed IN New York City and Boston. In Paris, at the Lucernaire Theatre, Wiseman staged The Belle of Amherst, a play by William Luce on the life of Emily Dickinson. Frederick Wiseman has received numerous awards, including four Emmys, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a Guggenheim, a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, and, in 2016, an Honorary Oscar from the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1971, in order to guarantee his creative independence, he founded his own production and distribution company, Zipporah Films.