Nancy Buirski

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 Buirskis 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 coproduced by American MastersPBS In 2017 Buirski made a documentary entitled The Rape of Recy Taylor about Recy Taylor an AfricanAmerican woman from Abbeville in Henry County Alabama In 1944 Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church and gangraped by seven white men Despite the mens 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 featurelength documentaries The Katrina Experience brought together a collection of films about Hurricane Katrina while Time Piece was a crosscultural 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