Beverly Shaffer
Beverly Shaffer ( born May 8, 1945 in Montreal ) is a Canadian director and producer. With her documentary short film I'll Find a Way she won an Oscar.
Life and work
Beverly Shaffer holds a degree in comparative religion and philosophy at McGill University, graduating with a BA in 1967. She then worked for two years as a high school teacher. In 1971, she earned a master's degree in the art film at Boston University. After that she worked until 1976 when Boston educational television channel WGBH - TV, which belongs to the broadcasting network Public Broadcasting Service. There, she ran searches for the program The reporter and worked as a production assistant for the children's series zoom, the popular science series Nova and The Advocates.
1975 Shaffer came to a place in Studio D at the National Film Board of Canada, for which she produced films over the next 25 years. First she turned ten posts for the Direct Cinema series Children of Canada. This included their short documentary I'll Find a Way about a girl with spina bifida, which was in 1978 awarded an Oscar in the category Best Short Film. Other documentaries followed.
Controversy sparked Shaffer's one-hour documentary, To a Safer Place ( 1987), which has been taking up the issue of incest and first aired in the PBS television show Frontline. It reported an adult female from the years of abuse by her father, she could end by escape from the parental home until the age of 14, since no one believed her. The documentary was also shown on BBC and CBC, won multiple awards and used by social workers.
In the 1990s, Shaffer produced seven episodes of the series Children of Jerusalem on Israeli and Palestinian children as well as a sequel to I'll Find a Way, titled Just a Wedding in which the portrayed girl marries. In Just a Wedding she began re-enactments to create dramatic effects.
Her last film Mr. Mergler 's Gift appeared in 2005. The documentary short film is about a dying piano teacher and his last student.