GAIL DOLGIN, Director/ProducerAPR 4, 1945 – OCT 7, 2010
Gail Dolgin was best known for Daughter from Danang, which follows the story of a Vietnamese mother and her Amerasian daughter as they reunite after a 22- year separation. Directed and Produced with Vicente Franco, the film was the 2002 winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award. It was nationally broadcast on the acclaimed PBS series American Experience. Her other films include Summer of Love, about San Francisco in the summer of 1967, commissioned by American Experience and broadcast nationally in 2007, Cuba Va: The Challenge of the Next Generation, New Bridges, Face to Face, and Why Vote. She was the associate producer on the Academy Award nominated Forever Activists: Stories of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Her path towards documentary filmmaking is a winding intersect of photography, storytelling, social activism, and teaching. Originally from New York, Gail graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in art history. Returning to New York in the 1960s she studied photography and joined Newsreel, a social issue driven film collective that launched her interest, and ultimately her career, in film which she pursued with passion in the Bay Area. She served as a story consultant and mentor to many filmmakers in the Bay Area, and sat on the selection committee for several film festivals, including Sundance.
Gail was dedicated to the documentary form as a way to impact the world, both as an artist and an activist. She has linked her commitment to justice with her love for filmmaking since the 1960s and chose to collaborate with Robin Fryday to tell Mr. Armstrong’s story knowing, that after years of battling breast cancer, this would be her last film.
