We’re excited to welcome talented director, writer, and producer Ezra Edelman to Superprime’s ranks.
Most recently, Ezra directed O.J.: Made in America, a seven hour documentary for ESPN. At this year’s inaugural Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards the project was recognized for the remarkable way in which it examined race and social justice in America going back to the ’50s and ’60s, and took home four trophies including Best Documentary and Best Director.
The Washington Post described O.J.: Made in America as, “nothing short of a towering achievement,” Vanity Fair said Ezra “crafted one of the best films of the year,” and Huffington Post praised the way in which he, “treats viewers to a nuanced portrait of a complicated man.” Variety highlighted the way the film deals with the nexus of race, celebrity, and sports, saying it “feels like a master opus,” and the LA Times said it was “thematically compelling and deeply human… a masterwork of scholarship, journalism and cinematic art.”
The meticulous and emotionally engaging five-part documentary was first screened at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Ezra also directed HBO’s Peabody Award-winning Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, a film which explores the fierce rivalry between NBA superstars Larry Bird and Magic Johnson during their decade of dominance, and Requiem For The Big East, a film chronicling the meteoric ascension of the Big East conference, taking a nostalgic look at the competition that made it great.
Ezra was raised in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. He is the son of renowned civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, who founded of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who specialized in the fields of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law. After college, Ezra found work as a researcher at CBS working on their coverage of the 1998 Winter Olympics. From there, he began directing sports documentaries that often went deeper by exploring the racial and social tensions present in athletes’ lives. “I was a history major at Yale once upon a time, but have spent the last two decades learning and honing my craft out in the real world,” he said. “Once I had had my first taste of long-form storytelling, I was hooked.”
We’re thrilled to have an auteur like Ezra join our director roster–someone who embrace challenges and cites “doing something I’ve never done before” as his inspiration. We look forward to working with him to showcase more of the director’s thoughtful, thorough and immersive storytelling. “I look forward to creating provocative, beautiful work in a different medium for me,” he said.
