James Longley, the Academy Award-nominated director of Iraq in Fragments and Sari's Mother, was named one of 24 MacArthur Fellows by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation yesterday. The Fellows will each receive a unrestricted grant of $500,000, amortized over the next five years. What's more, the grant requires no proposal, no application, no reporting, no stipulations--just the freedom and opportunity to continue to make a difference. The rest of us can keep on dreaming--and fundraising...
"For nearly three decades, the MacArthur Fellows Program has highlighted the importance of creativity and risk-taking in addressing pressing needs and challenges around the globe," said MacArthur President Robert Gallucci in a statement "Through these Fellowships, we celebrate and support exceptional men and women of all ages and in all fields who dream, explore, take risks, invent, and build in new and unexpected ways in the interest of shaping a better future for us all."
Longley, who had been in Iran the past couple of years making a film about a junior high school in the village of Pul, witnessed the post-election uprisings in June (for more, click here.). For both Iraq in Fragments and Sari's Mother, Longley directed, produced, shot, edited and composed the score. His previous film, Gaza Strip (2001) captures life in that occupied Israeli territory, five months after the 2000 Intifada and around the election of Prime Minster Ariel Sharon. Of that film, he wrote, "My idea of a good documentary is a film that captures the most essential aspects of its subject, a film that shows rather than tells. I wanted to make a film that would convey not only the hard facts of life inside the Gaza Strip, but also the emotions, sensations and driving desires of the people I filmed. I made the film to fill a gap in our knowledge and a blind spot in our thinking about this conflict, but more than anything this film is an attempt to record the humanity of the people I met there, the thing that is impossible to tell in words."
Longley studied film at both Wesleyan University and All-Russian Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. His student documentary, Portrait of Boy with Dog, about a boy in a Moscow orphanage, earned a Student Academy Award in 1994. For more information about the filmmaker, click here.
Longley is the eighth documentary filmmaker to earn a MacArthur Genius Grant. The others include Edet Belzberg, Jon Else, Louis Massiah, Errol Morris, Stanley Nelson, Marcel Ophuls and Frederick Wiseman. For more information about the Fellows Program, click here.