Lucille Carra is an American documentary film director, producer, and writer. She is of Italian American descent. All of her films have been seen on PBS and international television. Carra has a BFA in Film Production and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts is one of the 15 schools that make up New York University ....

, and also has an MS in Education from Queens College. At New York University, she was cited Outstanding Woman Student of the Year (School of the Arts) by the New York University Alumni Association. She formed Travelfilm Company for the production and distribution of documentary films after working in international film distribution.

Films

Carra's films are classified as arts documentaries, noted for new research and scholarship, use of newly found music, and classically filmed landscapes. They are independently produced, and are funded through cultural agencies, government foundations and television and distribution companies. Carra works in 16mm film and restored archival film and video.

Carra's films focus on artists and the specific cultural and social contexts in which they worked. The Inland Sea (1992) is based on the travel memoir by Donald Richie

Donald Richie

Donald Richie is an American-born author who has written about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Although he considers himself only a writer, Richie has directed many experimental films, the first when he was 17...

 and retraces the author's journey while documenting the fading regional culture of rural islands of the Seto Inland Sea. The isolated region was researched for a three year period before filming began. The film won the Best Documentary Award at the Hawaii International Film Festival and the Earthwatch Film Award. It screened at over forty film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival

Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

. It is in the permanent film collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Dvorak and America (2000) was the first U.S./Czech Television documentary co-production. It is the first film about the years the composer Antonin Dvorak

Antonín Dvorák

Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...

 spent in the United States and his relationships with his African-American students, including his informal student, Harry T. Burleigh. It features new orchestrations by Maurice Peress. It premiered at Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank Centre, London. The Last Wright: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Park Inn Hotel

The Last Wright: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Park Inn Hotel

The Last Wright is an American documentary film. It is the first project in any media focusing on the only surviving hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was produced by Travelfilm Company and McMar,Ltd/28 and was produced and written by Garry McGee and Lucille Carra and directed by Lucille Carra...

 (2008), produced and written with Garry McGee, is the only project in any media about the last standing hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...

, The Park Inn, located in Iowa. The film won the Grand Prize as Best Documentary at the Iowa Motion Picture Association and was nominated for a Midwest EMMY Award for Best Writing for Documentary. The film compares the degraded condition of the Park Inn Hotel with many of Wright's important works, and travels to Japan to offer contrast Wright's Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, was created in the late 1880s at the request of the Japanese aristocracy to cater to the increasing number of western visitors to Japan. The hotel site is located just south of the Imperial Palace grounds, next to the previous location of the Palace moat...

, now partially restored at Meiji-Mura, Japan. In 2007, researching material for a film on pianist Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould

Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach...

, Carra found the long-thought lost U.S. television program written and performed by the performer, The Return of the Wizard (1968). She presented screenings the Paley Center for Media and the Montreal Festival of Film on Art and was awarded a Media grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an award from the New York State Council on the Arts to restore the program and to continue the film's research.

External links

• Official Website http://www.travelfilmcompany.com
• Lucille Carra on International Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139913/
• New York Times review of The Inland Sea http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E0CE2DF143DF934A25755C0A964958260
• Associated Press article on Dvorak and America http://www.cgsi.org/news/2005/11/15/antonin-dvorak-spillville-iowa