Jennifer Fox

Jennifer Fox (born 1959) is an American film producer, director, cinematographer, and writer as well as president of A Luminous Mind Film Productions. She won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her first feature documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Her 2010 documentary My Reincarnation had its premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2010, where it won a Top 20 Audience Award. Early life Jennifer Fox was born into a Jewish family in 1959 in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her father, Richard J. Fox, was a U.S. Navy pilot who served in the Korean War and co-founded Fox Companies, a property construction firm in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Her mother, Geraldine Dietz Fox, after losing hearing in her left ear at the age of 27, helped to establish the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and founded the National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation (NOHR) in 1988. One of five children, Fox attended primary school at the Quaker Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. Fox knew she wanted to be a filmmaker from a young age after seeing the film Funny Girl, for an aunt's birthday. In 1980 she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Creative Writing, and in 1981 dropped out of New York University to film Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Career In 1981, Fox left NYU to accompany her friend and classmate, Gaby Bustros, to her ancestral home in Beirut, a 200-year-old Ottoman palace that had been bombed during the Lebanese Civil War. Here, she filmed the documentary Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987). A cinéma vérité-style documentary, Fox follows the Bustros family as they continue to live in their ruined mansion and survive the civil war. While the film was a critical success, winning for best Cinematography and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1988, Fox suffered post traumatic stress disorder upon finishing the film.