Jeffrey Friedman

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making movies together for over 35 years. Their first film, Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. This was Rob’s second Oscar, having won previously for The Times of Harvey Milk. Both films were chosen for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, as was Rob’s previous film Word Is Out. Rob and Jeffrey have had career retrospectives at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Film at Lincoln Center in New York, the Taipei International Film Festival in Taiwan, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal, and the Pink Apple Film Festival in Zurich. They are members of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They co-authored the textbook The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making. Jeffrey has had a distinguished career editing his own and other people’s films, including two Oscar-nominated shorts and one Oscar-winning feature. He has taught in the documentary graduate program at Stanford University.

During their residency at the Bogliasco Center, Jeffrey and Rob will begin developing a long-simmering idea: a film or installation project that revisits and reimagines their archival collection, titled Outtakes.