Rory Kennedy

Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (born December 12, 1968) is an American documentary filmmaker who is the eleventh and youngest child of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Kennedy has made documentary films that center on social issues such as addiction, nuclear radiation, the treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the politics of the Mexican border fence. Her films have been featured on many television networks.

Early life and education

Rory Kennedy was born on December 12, 1968 in Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. to parents Robert F. Kennedy, a former United States Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and 1968 U.S. presidential candidate, and his wife Ethel Kennedy. She was born six months after her father was assassinated. Her mother chose her name "Rory" after the last high king of Ireland, Rory O'Connor, who ruled in the 12th century.

On December 19, 1968, a week after Rory was born, her mother took her to her father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's older brother Michael LeMoyne Kennedy was assigned as her godparent by their mother. In December 1997, she tried to resuscitate her brother Michael after a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, which was fatal. Friends of the Kennedy family said Rory and Michael spoke almost every day of their lives.

When Rory was a teenager, she was arrested during a protest outside the South African Embassy. When she was 15, her 28-year-old brother David died from a drug overdose. Rory graduated from Madeira School in McLean, Virginia and then Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her sophomore year at Brown, Rory organized a rally in front of a Providence supermarket. In solidarity with migrant farm workers, she urged shoppers to boycott grapes.

Career

In the 1990s, Rory and fellow Brown classmate Vanessa Vadim (daughter of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda) formed May Day Media, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that specializes in the production and distribution of films with a social conscience. ''Women of Substance'' was Kennedy's first documentary. The film was released in 1994, and the idea came out of a paper about female addicts that she wrote while a student at Brown. In 1998, Kennedy and another fellow Brown graduate Liz Garbus founded Moxie Firecracker Films, which specializes in documentaries that highlight pressing social issues. The television networks that have shown its films include: A&E, the UK's Channel 4, Court TV, Discovery Channel, HBO, Lifetime, MTV, Oxygen, PBS, Sundance Channel, and TLC.

She directed and co-produced ''American Hollow'' (1999), a film about a struggling Appalachian family that received critical acclaim and many awards. HBO broadcast the film and publisher Little, Brown and Company simultaneously released Kennedy's companion book. Kennedy presented the documentary at Wittenberg University on September 13, 2001. After the film's presentation, she answered questions.
In October 2001, Kennedy traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to address the opening meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women. At the meeting, she spoke about her documentary film-production company ''Change the World Through Film''.

Kennedy directed and co-produced the Emmy Award-nominated series ''Pandemic: Facing AIDS'' (2003), which premiered at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on July 8, 2002. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it tells the real stories of AIDS patients outside the Western world. It was broadcast in America as a five-part series on HBO in June 2003.

Kennedy directed and co-produced ''A Boy's Life'' (2004), the story of a young boy and his family in rural Mississippi. The movie premiered to rave reviews at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Woodstock Film Festival; it was later broadcast on HBO.

When Kennedy was asked in a March 24, 2004, interview with ''Salon'' about her interest in the American South, she cited her father's experiences in the region as an inspiration and starting point. In the same article, she goes on to mention that showing class differences in American culture also motivates her.

She directed and co-produced ''Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable'' (2004) for HBO, which was broadcast on September 9, 2004. The film takes a "what if" look at the catastrophic consequences of a radioactive release at the Indian Point Energy Center, a three-unit nuclear-power plant station, located north of midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York.

Rory directed and co-produced ''Homestead Strike'' (2006) as part of The History Channel's series, '' 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America'' (April 2006).

She was a co-executive producer for '' Street Fight'' (2005), which chronicles the 2002 Newark, New Jersey

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