Bruce Sinofsky is an award-winning documentary film director, who began his career at
Maysles FilmsAlbert and David Maysles were a documentary filmmaking team whose cinéma vérité works include Salesman , Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens . Their 1964 film on The Beatles forms the backbone of the DVD, The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit...
.
Sinofsky was born in
BostonBoston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
. As Senior Editor for Maysles, he worked on commercials and feature films until 1991, when he and
Joe BerlingerJoseph "Joe" Berlinger is an American documentary film-maker who, in collaboration with Bruce Sinofsky, has created such films as Paradise Lost about the West Memphis 3, Brother's Keeper, Some Kind of Monster, and Crude....
formed their own production company, Creative Thinking International. They jointly produce, edit, and direct documentary films which have appeared on over 50 critics choice lists, including
Paradise LostParadise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is a 1996 documentary film directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about the trials of three teenage boys who came to be known as the West Memphis 3 in West Memphis, Arkansas. They were accused of the murder and sexual mutilation of three...
,
Brother's KeeperBrother's Keeper is a 1992 documentary directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The film is about an alleged 1990 murder in the village of Munnsville, New York. The film is in the "Direct Cinema" style of the Maysles brothers who had formerly employed Berlinger and Sinofsky.The film contrasts...
,
Hollywood HighHollywood High is a 2003 documentary television film about the depiction of drug addiction in film. It was directed by Bruce Sinofsky, and features appearances by Darren Aronofsky, Jared Leto and Hubert Selby Jr...
, and
Some Kind of MonsterSome Kind of Monster is a 2004 documentary film featuring the American heavy metal band Metallica. It shares its name with the song "Some Kind of Monster" from Metallica's 2003 album St. Anger....
.
Their work is done in various styles, including a paen to the
Cinéma véritéCinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
.
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster covers the band as they participate in group therapy before recording their first album in five years.
Paradise Lost chronicles the inhabitants of a small southern town a year after a series of brutal murders in style similar to that of award-winning documentary filmmaker
Errol MorrisErrol Mark Morris is an American director. In 2003, The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best directors. Also in 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.-Early life and...
. They have also done a documentary on the southern record label for blues and country western artists, Sun Records called
Good Rockin' Tonight.
The first movie Sinofsky directed, in 1992, was the documentary My Brother's Keeper, which tells the story of Delbart Ward, an elderly man in Munnsville, New York, who was charged with second-degree murder following the death of his brother William. Chicago Tribune film critic Roger Ebert, in his review of the movie, called it "an extraordinary documentary about what happened next, as a town banded together to stop what folks saw as a miscarriage of justice."
Sinofsky has won a Directors Guild Award and two Emmys.
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