Ben Neufeld

Ben Neufeld is a film and video maker living in Los Angeles. His work focuses on the boundaries between documentary and fiction, often combining the formal conventions of the two in order to magnify or reflect the assumptions we make about truth. His films explore themes of modern Jewish history and Zionism. He was born and raised in New York City , got his B.A. from Oberlin College in Ohio and an M.F.A. in Film + Video from CalArts. He recently finished a feature titled aw • rah • nyoosh, which explores and challenges a collective narrative of survival of the holocaust through the perspective of a third generation survivor documentary filmmaker. The film received an award from the Princess Grace Foundation and a production grant from Panavision. His work in progress, Tarshish, is a documentary essay film shot in and off the coast of Israel, narrated by a fictional matriarch who has decided to colonize an oceanic garbage patch in order to found a new state for the Jewish people. It received an Allan Sekula Award for Social Documentary. Ben has exhibited domestically and internationally in galleries, museums, TV broadcasts and a barge on the Daugava river.