Jesse Moss

Jesse Moss is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer known for his cinéma vérité style. His 2014 film, The Overnighters, was shortlisted for best documentary feature at the Oscars. He has directed four independent, feature-length films, and three television documentaries and has produced 15 documentaries. Moss is a cinema lecturer at San Francisco State University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and frequent collaborator Amanda McBaine and their two children. His office is in the Presidio, San Francisco. Early life Moss was born in San Francisco and raised in Palo Alto, California. His parents divorced when he was five. Though Moss never had any childhood aspirations toward filmmaking, his parents valued journalism. When Moss was a child, photojournalist Richard Boyle, who was famously depicted as a conflict-prone character dealing with substance abuse problems in Oliver Stone's 1986 movie Salvador, stayed in the Moss home and regaled the young Moss and his brother with stories of his adventures overseas. "In a way, that was inspiring," Moss told David Poland in 2014.