A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Sara Newens is a Los-Angeles based filmmaker and Emmy-award winning editor who began her career working for CBS News in New York City. Her first documentary feature, Top Spin, was acquired by First Run Features and received rave reviews from the LA Times and Wall Street Journal during its festival run and theatrical release. She also served as Editor/Writer for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s feature, On The Record, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and distributed by HBO Max. She recently completed a second collaboration with Dick and Ziering as Supervising Editor on the HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow. She is also known for cutting several fiction shorts and co-editing the critically acclaimed indie feature Freeland, as well as directing and editing the award-winning documentary short, Footprint, featured in The New York Times Op-Docs series. A graduate of the MFA Documentary Film and Video Program at Stanford University, she continues to create original work through her production company Wild Pair Films, co-owned by Mina T. Son. Currently, they are developing their next feature entitled Racist Trees, which chronicles a historically Black neighborhood in Palm Springs fighting for the removal of a wall of trees that many residents believe were originally planted as a totem of segregation. In addition, she helms the LA chapter of Video Consortium, a global organization for nonfiction storytellers and video journalists.
Camera Operator:
2014 Top Spin
Co-Producer:
2014 Top Spin
Consulting Editor:
2014 Top Spin
2025 Are We Good?
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Director:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2022 Racist Trees
2025 Are We Good?
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Editor:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2017 Gut Hack
2018 Roles We Play
2020 On the Record
2021 Freeland
2022 Racist Trees
2022 The Dark Side of a Hollywood Icon
2024 The White House Effect
2025 Are We Good?
2025 Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Producer:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2017 Gut Hack
2018 Roles We Play
2020 On the Record
2021 Freeland
2022 Racist Trees
2022 The Dark Side of a Hollywood Icon
2024 The White House Effect
2025 Are We Good?
2025 Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Sound:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2017 Gut Hack
2018 Roles We Play
2020 On the Record
2021 Freeland
2022 Racist Trees
2022 The Dark Side of a Hollywood Icon
2024 The White House Effect
2025 Are We Good?
2025 Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Thanks:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2017 Gut Hack
2018 Roles We Play
2020 L.A. Roll
2020 On the Record
2021 Freeland
2022 Racist Trees
2022 The Dark Side of a Hollywood Icon
2024 The White House Effect
2025 Are We Good?
2025 Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Writer:
2010 Top Spin
2014 Top Spin
2017 Gut Hack
2018 Roles We Play
2020 L.A. Roll
2020 On the Record
2021 Freeland
2022 Racist Trees
2022 The Dark Side of a Hollywood Icon
2024 The White House Effect
2025 Are We Good?
2025 Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
???? Now Return Us To Normal
Editor:
2021 Allen v. Farrow
2023 Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields
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.