Kevin MacDonald (director)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kevin Macdonald (born October 28, 1967) is a Scottish documentary film director, best known for One Day in September (2000) and Touching the Void (2003).

Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the grandson of the Hungarian-born English filmmaker Emeric Pressburger, and educated at Glenalmond College. He began his career with a biography of his grandfather, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (1994), which he turned into the documentary The Making of an Englishman (1995). His brother Andrew Macdonald is a film producer.

After making a series of biographical documentaries, Macdonald directed One Day in September (2000), about the murder of Israeli atheletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Possibly the most striking feature of this film was the lengthy interview with Jamal Al-Gashey, the last known survivor of the Munich fedayeen (it has been suggested recently in Aaron Klein's book Striking Back that another, Mohammed Safady, might also still be alive). Macdonald was able to find Al-Gashey through intermediaries, and was able to convince him that the film would only be truly authentic if Al-Gashey gave his side of the story. Since the former terrorist was convinced that Israeli authorities were still hunting him (he had been in hiding ever since being ransomed for a hijacked airplane less than two months after the Munich massacre), Al-Gashey agreed to the interview only on condition that he would be disguised, his face would be shown only in shadow or blurred out, and that he would provide Macdonald with the location of the interview (which turned out to be Amman, Jordan) and a cinematographer, who would also conduct the interview in Macdonald's presence. Since the interview was conducted entirely in Arabic, and Al-Gashey (through paranoia or annoyance) frequently stormed out of the interview room, Macdonald didn't know if he had anything usable until he returned to London and hired an Arabic translator. The results spoke for themselves - the film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

His next film was Touching the Void, which told the story of two climbers' disastrous attempt to scale the Siula Grande in the Andes in 1985. The film won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2004 BAFTA Awards – coincidently, it was Korda who had given Macdonald's grandfather his first job when he had arrived in England in 1935.

In 1999 he married Tatiana Lund.

1 Filmography
2 Bibliography
3 Literature
4 External links

[edit] Filmography

As director:

The Making of an Englishman (1995)
Chaplin's Goliath (1996), a film about the actor Eric Campbell.
The Moving World of George Rickey (1997)
Howard Hawks: American Artist (1997)
Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1998, also producer), about the film director Donald Cammell.
One Day in September (2000)
Humphrey Jennings (2000)
A Brief History of Errol Morris (2000)
Being Mick (2001). A fly-on-the-wall documentary following Mick Jagger.
Touching the Void (2003).
The Last King of Scotland (2006)

[edit] Bibliography

Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter by Kevin Macdonald. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. ISBN 0-571-16853-1 (Paperback ISBN 0-571-17829-4).
Imagining reality: the Faber book of the documentary by Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. ISBN 0-571-17723-9.