David Koff

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David Richard Koff (born 1939 in Philadelphia, United States) is an award-winning maker of documentary films, social activist, writer, researcher, and editor. His interest in social and economic justice has shaped a career largely spent exploring human rights, colonialism, resistance movements, racism, labor unions, and the oppression and exploitation of undocumented workers in America. However, he veered from political concerns long enough to write and produce the film he may be best known for, People of the Wind for which, in 1976, he was nominated for an Academy Award.

1 Early Years: from the U.S. to Africa
2 The African Films
3 People of the Wind
4 Blacks Britannica
5 Occupied Palestine
6 Labor Movement Activity and Films
7 Later Life
8 References

[edit] Early Years: from the U.S. to Africa

Koff grew up in Van Nuys, California. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in political science in 1961, Koff traveled to West Africa, teaching in Sierra Leone and participating in a voluntary work-camp project in Ghana. As a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in 1964, he returned, this time to East Africa, where he did academic research as well as writing and editing at the Nairobi-based East African Publishing House until 1967, during which he took extended field trips to Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Madagascar. Based in England from late 1969 to mid 1974, Koff returned to East Africa to film a series of documentary films for four months in 1970, then moved back to Nairobi in late 1974 to resume his work for the East African Publishing House.

[edit] The African Films

Koff's early films reflect this period. In addition to many short projects, he produced (with partner Anthony Howarth) and directed The Kenya Trilogy: Black Man's Land, released in 1972-73, narrated by his then-wife, Msindo Mwinyipembe (the couple separated in 2001). The three films, still used in hundreds of university African Studies departments today, are White Man's Country, Mau Mau, and Kenyatta. All explore the state of emergency declared by the British in Kenya in 1952, including the propagandist creation of the imaginary Mau Mau terrorist group by the white minority to justify repression of the native population during the four-year civil war, and the rise of leader Jomo Kenyatta. Koff's use of newsreels, photographs and then-contemporaneous interviews with those who lived through this tumultuous period, has been praised for its authenticity and archival value. Portions of some of these interviews have recently been included in Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, a 2007 film about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan environmental activist, made by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater.

[edit] People of the Wind

In 1976, Koff joined again with Howarth to make a documentary of a different kind, People of the Wind. The film follows the Bakhtiari, nomadic pastoralists,of Iran, as they make their way from winter to summer pastures. People of the Wind ^[1] was nominated in 1976 for an Academy Award as Best Feature Documentary. It was narrated by actor James Mason. ^[2]

[edit] Blacks Britannica

In 1978, Koff returned to England for six months to make the film Blacks Britannica. Originally commissioned by the Boston public television station WGBH, it later "raised hackles" ^[3] at the station due to its perceived overtly political content. The ensuing legal battle over censorship, the right to make final cuts, and airing and distribution, was widely debated in the media at the time.

[edit] Occupied Palestine

Koff next turned his attention to the Middle East, where he made the even more controversial Occupied Palestine, one of the first American films to look sympathetically at the Palestinian struggle for an independent homeland, and again engendering media debate.

[edit] Labor Movement Activity and Films

After returning to the U.S. in the 1980s, Koff worked as a Senior Researcher, videographer, and tactician with Local 11 of HERE, a position which included speech writing, the creation of many short in-house strategic organizing videos, and developing film archives of various actions (such as the 2005 'Banquet in the Streets' ^[4], demonstrations, and campaigns, the largest of which was the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. He served as founder and executive producer of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Documentary Project.

Other projects included The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, ^[5]; Koff's film, Windows, a film with the families and colleagues of immigrant workers killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11, which premiered at the 2002 Latino International Film Festival. Another recent film, The New Haven Raids / Les Redadas de New Haven,with music by Ry Cooder, has been described as "from the frontlines of a human and civil rights crisis that is worldwide" ^[6], and was selected by Cineculture ^[7] as part of the spring 2008 series.

[edit] Later Life

In 2006 Koff formed Organizing Video Productions with filmmaker Lynn Goldfarb.^[8] He presently divides his time between Los Angeles, California, and Saxtons River, Vermont. There he lives with his partner, writer Crescent Dragonwagon^[9], with whom he made one of the more lighthearted films of his career, a short music video, The Cornbread Flutters Ball.^[10]

Koff's daughter, Clea Koff, is a forensic anthropologist and writer ^[11],who has published one book,The Bone Woman, about her work in the mass graves in Rwanda and Croatia.