Amir Bar-Lev

Amir Bar-Lev is an American documentary director whose debut changed the form. Born in 1972, he directed Fighter, which Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice named among the year's best documentaries and won six international festival awards. His second film, My Kid Could Paint That, was ranked by the London Telegraph among the top 100 films of all time; The Philadelphia Inquirer called it "a thought-provoking look at the world of abstract art, the relationship between a reporter and his/her subject, and the nature of truth".

Bar-Lev traveled to New Orleans nine days after Hurricane Katrina and filmed Trouble the Water, which he co-produced—a 2009 Academy Award nominee that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the IFP Gotham Award for Best Documentary. He then directed The Tillman Story, a feature about NFL safety Pat Tillman, who joined the Army Rangers in 2002 and was killed in a friendly fire incident two years later; the film won an Emmy and was named top documentary of 2010 by the San Francisco, Florida, and St. Louis film critics' circles.

His 2013 film Happy Valley examined the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, premiering at Sundance 2014 and releasing theatrically that November; Variety called it "nuanced but quietly excoriating," and Kenneth Turan at the LA Times termed it "explosive". Bar-Lev's most recent work, Long Strange Trip, a four-hour documentary on the Grateful Dead, was shortlisted for the Oscar and called "one of the most engrossing rock docs ever made" by the LA Times. As a screenwriter and director, Bar-Lev works in documentary narrative, where investigation meets character portraiture. A Capricorn born in January, he embodies the sign's patient, structural approach to unraveling complex human stories.