Jon Alpert

Jon Alpert (born c. December 13, 1948) is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, known for his use of a cinéma vérité approach in his films.

Life and career

A native of Port Chester, New York, Jonathan B. Alpert is a 1970 graduate of Colgate University, and has a black belt in karate.

Alpert has traveled widely as an investigative journalist and has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Cuba, China, and Afghanistan. He has made films for NBC, PBS, and HBO. Over the course of his career, he has won 16 Emmy Awards and three DuPont-Columbia Awards. He has been nominated for a 2010 Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary, Short Subject for '' China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province''. He was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award in the same category for ''Redemption''. Alpert won the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media with co-director Ellen Goosenberg Kent for their documentary ''War Torn: 1861-2010''.

In 1972, Alpert and his wife, Keiko Tsuno, founded the Downtown Community Television Center, one of the country's first community media centers.

In 1974, Alpert and Tsuno made ''Cuba: The People''. Neither he nor Tsuno knew anything about film and couldn’t afford to learn, so they chose to use video. "Keiko’s brother would literally go to the factory, and as the first color portapak was coming off JVC’s assembly line, we’d get serial number one of everything," Alpert said. According to Alpert, the film was the first independently produced color documentary recorded on video. Jon Alpert ended up interviewing Fidel Castro several times.

Between 1979 and 1991, Alpert was the sole freelance video documentarist regularly featured on network television. His reports for NBC's ''The Today Show'' and '' Nightly News'' offered mass audiences a view of domestic and international affairs from a decidedly decentered perspective.

In 1991, while employed by NBC, Alpert was the first American journalist to bring back uncensored video footage from the first Persian Gulf War. The footage, much of it focusing on civilian casualties, was cancelled three hours before it was supposed to be aired, and Alpert was simultaneously fired. Later that year, CBS Evening News Executive Producer Tom Bettag planned to air the footage but this airing was also cancelled, and Bettag fired. Jon Alpert was one of the few Western journalists to have conducted a videotaped interview with Saddam Hussein since the Persian Gulf War.

In November 2021, HBO Max announced they would debut Alpert's ''Life of Crime'' documentaries, a thirty-six year chronicle of criminal and drug addicts in Newark, New Jersey

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