A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Award-winning filmmaker Ravit Markus had documentary features in Slamdance two years in a row, winning the Audience Award in 2023 for "American Pot Story: Oaksterdam" and receiving wonderful reviews for Paralympic doc "Nina is an Athlete" in 2024, as part of the disability focused Unstoppable program. Winner of multiple international awards by now, "Oaksterdam" is a 10-year exploration of the power of the activist, no matter the cause, "a must-watch for every American" (Film Threat). Her previous documentaries include the critically acclaimed "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" which she wrote and produced. It became a cultural phenomenon when it commercially played in theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Tel Aviv for months and months garnering raving reviews at the NY Times, LA Times, and the NY Magazine, to mention a few, resulting in a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It also made critic Jennifer Merin's top 10 documentaries list of 2007 in About.com. Ravit co-produced Jewish Film Festivals' darling "Rock in the Red Zone"; and produced the Channel 4 UK documentary "Porn Shutdown", which aired worldwide including on the Sundance Channel, and received excellent reviews in The Guardian and the London Time Out. Ravit is a recipient of the NYWIFT Disability Awareness Completion Grant for "Nina" which was hailed for its authentic and universal look at womanhood and disability. She holds a dual BFA in Screenwriting and Directing from The Film and TV Department at Tel Aviv University.
Director:
2023 American Pot Story: Oaksterdam
2024 Nina is an Athlete
Producer:
2023 American Pot Story: Oaksterdam
2024 Nina is an Athlete
Writer:
2023 American Pot Story: Oaksterdam
2024 Nina is an Athlete
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.