Nancy Buirski — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Nancy Florence Buirski (née Cohen; June 24, 1945 – August 29, 2023; New York City) was an American documentary filmmaker, producer, photographer and a founder of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. She wrote, directed, and produced the documentary films A Crime on the Bayou (2020) and Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2022).

In 1998 Buirski founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, in collaboration with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and directed it for ten years. However, she did not herself make documentaries until The Loving Story in 2011, which concerned the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple. Married in the District of Columbia in 1958 they had not realized that their marriage was illegal in Virginia, where they lived, and were only able to avoid imprisonment by agreeing to leave the state. After a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court found unanimously in their favor in 1967. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and was later presented at numerous other events. The film won an Emmy. Buirski was awarded a prize for The Loving Story at the Peabody Awards in 2012 and the movie was also on the shortlist for the Oscar in the category Best Documentary. The documentary was used by director Jeff Nichols as inspiration for the movie Loving (2016), for which Buirski was a producer. Buirski's second documentary, in 2013, Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq tells the story of the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio in 1956 while on tour, and remained paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. Buirski followed this in 2015 with By Sidney Lumet, which provides a portrait of the American movie director Sidney Lumet, based on an interview made in 2008 by Daniel Anker. Lumet talks about his films, remembers colleagues, family and friends and looks back at the beginning of his career as an actor in a Jewish theater group. Both films were co-produced by American Masters/PBS. In 2017, Buirski made a documentary entitled The Rape of Recy Taylor about Recy Taylor, an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. In 1944, Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church and gang-raped by seven white men. Despite the men's confessions, two grand juries declined to indict them and no charges were ever brought. In 2011, the Alabama Legislature officially apologized on behalf of the state "for its failure to prosecute her attackers." The film was awarded the Human Rights Nights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.

Buirski was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her documentaries, she produced several collections of Full Frame shorts and a collection of feature-length documentaries. The Katrina Experience brought together a collection of films about Hurricane Katrina, while Time Piece was a cross-cultural collection of Turkish and American shorts. She also produced Althea, a film about the Black tennis player, Althea Gibson.

Buirski died on August 29, 2023, at the age of 78.

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