A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Ellen Bruno is an award winning documentary filmmaker based in San Francisco. With a background in international relief work, Ellen’s films have focused on issues at the forefront of human rights. She began her relief efforts in remote Mayan villages in Tabasco, Mexico. She has worked in refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border with the International Rescue Committee, in Vietnamese boat camps with The Refugee Section of the American Embassy in Thailand, and as director of the Cambodian Women's Project for the American Friends Service Committee. She has also been a hospice worker for the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. Ellen completed a masters degree in documentary film at Stanford University. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, a Goldie Award for Outstanding Artist, an Alpert Award for the Arts,an Anonymous Was A Woman Award for the Arts, a Shenkin Fellowship from Yale University School of Art, and was an Artist-in- Residence at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Ellen serves on the Board of the Buddhist Film Festival, the Pacific Pioneer Fund, and Ethical Traveler.Org. She is a strategic planning consultant with the Creative Capital Foundation’s Professional Development Workshops, working throughout the country to provide artists a cohesive structure to organize, plan and sustain creative careers.
Director:
1989 Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia
1995 Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy
1998 Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
2004 Leper Life Beyond Stigma
2005 Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual
2017 Filmmakers Unite (FU)
Music:
1989 Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia
1995 Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy
1998 Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
2004 Leper Life Beyond Stigma
2005 Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual
2012 Into the Current: Burma's Political Prisoners
2017 Filmmakers Unite (FU)
Producer:
1989 Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia
1995 Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy
1998 Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
2004 Leper Life Beyond Stigma
2005 Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual
2012 Into the Current: Burma's Political Prisoners
2017 Filmmakers Unite (FU)
Script Consultant:
1989 Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia
1995 Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy
1998 Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
2004 Leper Life Beyond Stigma
2005 Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual
2012 Into the Current: Burma's Political Prisoners
2017 Filmmakers Unite (FU)
2021 When We Were Bullies
Writer:
1989 Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia
1995 Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy
1998 Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
2004 Leper Life Beyond Stigma
2005 Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual
2012 Into the Current: Burma's Political Prisoners
2017 Filmmakers Unite (FU)
2021 When We Were Bullies
2023 Skin of Glass
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.