Amir Bar-Lev

Amir Bar-Lev, born in 1972, is a renowned American director lauded for his insightful documentary films. Bar-Lev's debut film, Fighter (2000) received critical acclaim and was named one of the year's top documentaries by Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. The film won six international festival awards and received high praise in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. The London Telegraph honored Bar-Lev's second film, My Kid Could Paint That, as one of the top 100 films of all time, and the Philadelphia Inquirer described it as a thought-provoking exploration of abstract art, journalistic relationships, and the concept of truth.

Bar-Lev's filmography is diverse and socially conscious. Post Hurricane Katrina, he documented the life of a young couple in New Orleans in Trouble the Water, which earned an Academy Award nomination in 2009. His film, The Tillman Story, about NFL safety Pat Tillman, was highly decorated and picked as the best documentary of 2010 by multiple critics' circles. In 2013, Bar-Lev released Happy Valley, a nuanced exploration of the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State. More recently, he directed Long Strange Trip, a four-hour epic on the Grateful Dead, which was also shortlisted for the Oscar.