Aviva Kempner is the scriptwriter, director and producer of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. Due to the difficulty in raising funds, Ms. Kempner devoted thirteen years of her life to completing this compelling documentary on the Jewish baseball slugger. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg won the Audience Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Spirit Award for Best Sports Documentary at the International Sports Video and Film Awards. The film also received the Audience Award (Documentary) at the Washington Jewish Film Festival and the CINE Golden Eagle. She was Awarded a 2000 Mayor's Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline based on the theatrical release of her film. The film is the New York Film Critics choice for Best Non-Fiction Film,2000 and was voted Best Documentary, 2000 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.
In the 80s, Kempner co-wrote and produced Partisans of Vilna, a feature-length documentary film on Jewish resistance against the Nazis. The film was theatrically distributed, won a CINE Golden Eagle as well as First Prize at Anthropos, and was shown at the Berlin, Haifa, London, Toronto, and Troia Film Festivals. Partisans of Vilna aired on PBS's "P.O.V" as well as on European and Israeli television. The record based on the film was nominated for a 1991 Grammy Award.
Kempner is a recipient of the 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship for filmmaking. She also consulted on a documentary on Shimon Peres, and wrote narration for Promises to Keep, the Academy Award-nominated documentary on the homeless. In 2009, Kempner directed Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, a documentary on television pioneer Gertrude Berg which The New York Times called "engrossing".
She writes film criticism and feature articles for numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, Washington Jewish Week and The Washington Post. She also lectures about cinema throughout the country. Kempner is the Founder and past Director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
Kempner was born on December 23, 1946 in Berlin. In 1950, her family moved to Detroit, where she grew up hearing about Greenberg’s exploits from her Lithuanian-born father, who was an American soldier in World War II. Her mother, born in Poland, was a Holocaust survivor.
The National Center For Jewish Film
Brandeis University, Lown 102, MS053, Waltham MA 02454
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