NYWIFT Talks with ‘Crazy, Not Insane’ Producer Ophelia Harutyunyan, 11/11, 6PM
Welcome to NYWIFT Talks, a new weekly series to bring updated news and vital information about the impact of COVID-19 on the media and entertainment industry. Industry professionals will be in conversation discussing what you need to know about theatrical releases, digital advances, virtual tools, festival opportunities, production updates and more.
NYWIFT Talks are free for all to attend.
In this week’s NYWIFT Talks, join Producer Ophelia Harutyunyan for a Zoom conversation. We’ll focus on her new HBO Documentary Crazy, Not Insane, which airs on HBO on November 18, 2020.
Date: Wednesday, November 11
Time: 6 PM EST
Crazy, Not Insane, directed and produced by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney (HBO’s Agents of Chaos and The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley) debuts Wednesday, November 18, exclusively on HBO. Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis has dedicated her career to the study of murderers, seeking answers to the question of why we kill. This provocative documentary explores, like a scientific detective story, Dr. Lewis’s lifelong attempts to look beyond the grisly details of homicides into the hearts and minds of the killers themselves.
An official selection of the 2020 Venice International Film Festival, the documentary profiles Dr. Lewis and her research, including videotaped death row interviews, examining the formative experiences and neurological dysfunction of such infamous murderers as Arthur Shawcross and Ted Bundy, challenging the very notion of evil and proposing that murderers are made not born.
This conversation will be moderated by NYWIFT Board Member Alex Cirillo
Panelists
Producer Ophelia Harutyunyan is a Brooklyn-based documentary and fiction filmmaker from Armenia. Most recently, she, alongside Alex Gibney and Suzanne Hillinger, directed and produced the documentary “Totally Under Control”, about the American government’s failed response to the covid-19 pandemic. She was the associate producer on the Emmy-nominated The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (HBO) and Citizen K (Amazon). Her films have played at notable film festivals like Venice FF, Sundance, TIFF, SXSW, IDFA and Clermont-Ferrand FF.
Alex Cirillo is a Producer and the Co-Founder of Big Vision Empty Wallet, an inclusion-focused incubator that feeds projects into her production company, Big Vision Creative. She develops unexpected content with women, POC, LGBTQ & differently-abled creators. Her most recent films include The Light of the Moon (SXSW 2017 Audience Award Winner), Lez Bomb (Gravitas/Netflix 2018), Academy Award-Qualifying One Cambodian Family Please for My Pleasure (TNT/Refinery29, Sundance 2019), and Red, White & Wasted (Tribeca 2019). An active member of NYWIFT for the past decade, Cirillo also serves on the Events Committee for Time’s Up and the Festival Committee for WIP.