judith helfand
Peabody award-winning filmmaker, activist and educator Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical, and intractable world of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make it personal, resonant, highly charged and even entertaining.
Her award-winning films, including A HEALTHY BABY GIRL and BLUE VINYL, explore home, class, family, continuity, intergenerational relationships, the long arm of corporate power, the impact of long-term chemical exposure on core parts of our lives, and the ever decreasing borders between what is "personal" and what is a critical part of the public record. Using her personal experience with DES-related cancer as a jumping off point, Helfand makes honest, useful and human links between home and the shop floor, between suburban/urban consumers and workers, between institutions of faith and higher learning and a toxic marketplace that is highly vulnerable to evolved, conscious, politicized consumers.
Helfand speaks widely with her films, which are known for inspiring unlikely community and institutional partnerships and unique interdisciplinary opportunities. Her workshops include: linking filmmaking to social change; making the toxic popular and environmental issues "cool" and Jewish (even); the literal meaning of "one generation to the next" in this time of chemical exposure; translating toxic chemical exposure into stories the media will cover; and the power of personal narrative. Helfand is currently a professor in New York University's undergraduate film and television department and at work on a new "toxic comedy" about global warming. She leaves her audiences laughing in the face of corporate power, willing to take concrete action, and interested in exploring how to use their status and institutional affiliations to support environmental health and justice.
Helfand defines herself as a filmmaker/organizer and has worked as a documentary producer and educator for the past ten years. She co-produced and co-directed THE UPRISING OF 34 with veteran documentarian George Stoney. The feature labor documentary was broadcast nationally on the acclaimed PBS series POV in 1995 and voted one of that years ten best documentaries by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Helfand used a more personal, humorous and ironic style with A HEALTHY BABY GIRL, a DES daughter's diary about "wonder drugs" and rude awakenings. It was in competition at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, had its television premiere on POV and received a Peabody Award for Excellence in Journalism and Public Education.
BLUE VINYL, the 2002 crowd pleaser of a "toxic comedy" co-directed and co-produced with Daniel Gold, is a sequel of sorts, that picks up right in front of her parents blue vinyl house and was broadcast nationally on HBO's premiere series "American Undercover". Accolades include the 2002 Excellence in Cinematography Award, an IDA nomination for "Best Documentary", a "Nice Modernist" award from Dwell Magazine, the 2002 Environmental Messenger of the Year from the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a 2002 EPIC Award from the Whitehouse Project and two recent Emmy Nominations for "Best Research and "Best Documentary".
Building on ten years of creating strategic distribution efforts with her documentaries, Helfand co-founded Working Films, a nationally recognized organization that is dedicated to leveraging the power and prestige of documentary to long-term economic, social and environmental justice.
With the success of BLUE VINYL, Helfand and her filmmaking partner Daniel B. Gold formed a production company, Toxic Comedy Pictures, to create original, entertaining media with a social conscience and a sense of humor. They are currently in production on their next "toxic comedy", a feature documentary about global warming, called MELTING PLANET.
Co-founded in 2006, Julie Parker Benello, Wendy Ettinger and Judith Helfand, Chicken and Egg Pictures is a film fund that provides financial, producing and creative support to emerging and veteran women filmmakers at strategic points in the development, completion and launch of their non-fiction and fiction films.
