Jon Alpert
Director · b. 1948 · Port Chester, New York, USA
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jon Alpert (born c. 1948) is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, known for his use of a cinéma vérité approach in his films. A native of Port Chester, New York, Alpert is a 1970 graduate of Colgate University, and has a black belt in karate. Alpert has traveled widely as an investigative journalist, and has made films for NBC, PBS, and HBO. Over the course of his career, he has won 15 Emmy Awards and three DuPont-Columbia Awards. He has been nominated for a 2010 Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary, Short Subject for China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. He has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Cuba, China, and Afghanistan. In 1972, Alpert and his wife, Keiko Tsuno, founded the Downtown Community Television Center, one of the country's first community media centers. He has interviewed Fidel Castro several times, and was one of the few Western journalists to have conducted a videotaped interview with Saddam Hussein since the Persian Gulf War. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jon Alpert, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Movies6
Movie7.2DocumentaryOn March 13, 2022, filmmaker Brent Renaud was killed by Russian soldiers, the first American journalist to die while reporting on the war in Ukraine. His younger brother and collaborator, Craig Renaud, recovered Brent’s body and his final recordings from Ukraine and brought them back to their childhood home in Arkansas. As Brent’s journey to his final resting place unfolds, the film chronicles the years he and his brother spent covering some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
2025 · 31 votes
Movie7.5DocumentaryThis revealing portrait of Cuba follows the lives of Fidel Castro and three Cuban families affected by his policies over the last four decades.
Cuba and the Cameraman
2017 · 123 votes
Movie6.7DocumentaryDocuments 18 months in the lives of three crack addicts in Lowell, Massachusetts.
High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell
1995 · 21 votes
Movie6.8DocumentaryTV MovieTheir job is stealing, their lives a cruel dead end. Director Jon Alpert takes his cameras undercover for this hard-hitting look at men who live by theft and suffer addiction. Focusing on a year in the lives of three professional criminals, this gritty profile—which includes hidden-camera footage of actual thefts—exposes the "petty" crimes that are paralyzing America.
One Year in a Life of Crime
1989 · 5 votes
MovieDocumentaryProduced by DCTV in response to what its makers saw as distorted media portrayals of New York City’s Chinatown, "Chinatown: Immigrants in America" (1976) offers an unvarnished portrait of an immigrant community confronting poverty, labor exploitation, and cultural displacement. Directed by Jon Alpert and Yoko Maruyama, the film documents restaurant, garment, and service workers enduring low wages and unsafe conditions while struggling to build lives in America.
Movie5.0DocumentaryAmerican and Russian filmmakers with disabilities collaborate through an international exchange program to create films about their lives, using media as a tool for empowerment, advocacy, and cross-cultural connection.
All For One: Media Enabled Musketeers
2018 · 1 votes