Joshua Seftel

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Joshua Seftel

Joshua Seftel (born July 17, 1968) is an American filmmaker.^[1] Born in Schenectady, New York, Seftel graduated from Tufts University in the class of 1990 as a Pre-med and French Literature major. He currently lives in New York City and is represented by Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, California. Seftel directed the feature film comedy War, Inc. (2008), a political satire about an American assassin sent on a mission to a war zone in Central Asia, starring John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, and Ben Kingsley.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Career

Seftel began his career in documentaries. At age 22, he received a National Emmy Nomination for his first film, Lost and Found: the Story of Romania’s Forgotten Children,^[2] a documentary about the plight of Romania’s 120,000 orphaned and abandoned children. Seftel lived in orphanages for several weeks while shooting the film. The Public Television broadcast of the film led to hundreds of adoptions of Romanian orphans and helped raise money and awareness for the cause.

Old Warrior, (1994) Seftel’s next film, is a documentary about the forgotten history of the Senior Citizens Power Movement and its founder, Frank J. Manning and received the Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival and was broadcast on Public TV.

In 1996, Seftel produced Taking on the Kennedys for the PBS series P.O.V.^[3] which followed the campaign of Republican candidate Kevin Vigilante as he challenged Patrick Kennedy for a U.S. Congressional seat in Rhode Island. Taking on the Kennedys was named one of TIME’s “Ten Best Television Programs of 2006”^[4] and has been anthologized in P.O.V.’s 20th Anniversary Collection DVD set.

Seftel's next film was Ennis’ Gift, an HBO documentary about learning differences produced with Bill Cosby in memory of Cosby’s late son Ennis, which featured Danny Glover, James Earl Jones, Anne Bancroft, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Schwab and Bruce Jenner. It has been called “informative and inspirational” and received the 2002 Literacy in Media Award from the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles.

Seftel broke into scripted film work with Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story^[5] that told the fictional story of one young librarian’s quest to defeat toxic, asthma-inducing mold. The title character borrows the name of real-life NPR librarian Kee Malesky. The humorous film originated when Maryland Public Television asked Seftel to make a fictional piece about indoor air quality for middle-school aged children. The film played at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, the Newport International Film Festival, the Austin Film Festival and the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. Breaking the Mold was shown at the One Reel Film Festival in Seattle where director Alexander Payne was a judge. After seeing the film, Payne championed Seftel as a director of features and put him in touch with John Cusack and Mark Leyner who were taken with Seftel's work. This led to Seftel directing the feature film War, Inc. starring Cusack, and co-written by Leyner, Cusack, and Jeremy Pikser.

Seftel has also worked in television, producing for ABC Turning Point, CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning, PBS' Nova Science Now series and the award-winning public radio program This American Life. At CBS News, Seftel was brought in by then Executive Vice President Jonathan Klein (current President of CNN) to pioneer the use of the mini-DV format at the network.

In reality television, he directed the first two seasons of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and received a National Emmy Award Nomination for his work on the series. He also helped develop the A&E series Confessions of a Matchmaker, featuring Patti Novak, directing the series pilot, and served as Supervising Producer for the series.

For This American Life, Seftel produced a 1997 radio documentary entitled Trek^[6] about an exploration of race and friendship in post-apartheid South Africa. He also produced a segment called “Still Life” in episode #2 “My Way” for This American Life^[7] the television show, which aired on Showtime in 2007.

Seftel was awarded a National Arts Journalism Fellowship^[8] at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003.