Film: Perfect Strangers by Jan Krawitz
The Department of Art & Art History presents a screening of Perfect Strangers, a film by Jan Krawitz, professor of documentary film and video, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, a father-daughter donor-recipient pair, and a “non-directed” kidney donor.
Perfect Strangers tells the story of two unique and engaging characters. Ellie embarks on an unpredictable journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys. 500 miles away, Kathy endures nightly dialysis and loses hope of receiving a transplant until Ellie reads her profile on an online website. Both women face unexpected challenges as their parallel stories unfold over the course of four years. Perfect Strangers raises questions about what motivates an individual towards an extreme act of compassion.
Jan Krawitz has been independently producing documentary films for 35 years. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, SilverDocs, London, Sydney, Full Frame, South by Southwest and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her 2004 film, Big Enough, was broadcast on the national PBS series POV and internationally in eighteen countries. Her documentaries, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People, and Drive-in Blues, were all broadcast on national PBS. Krawitz’s short film Styx is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Little People was nominated for a national Emmy Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Krawitz has had one-woman retrospectives of her films at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, the Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2011, she was awarded an artist’s residency at Yaddo. Krawitz is a professor at Stanford University where she teaches in the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video.
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