Director John Zartisky
John Zaritsky has won more than 30 awards for his documentary films. Some of his major honors include an Academy Award® for his documentary“Just Another Missing Kid”, a Cable Ace Award for “Rapists: Can They be Stopped”, a Golden Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for “My Husband is Going to Kill Me”, a Robert F. Kennedy Foundation Award for “Born in Africa”, and an Alfred Dupont Award from Columbia University’s School of Journalism for “Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo”.
His films have won awards at the New York Film Festival, the American Film Festival, Banff Television Festival, Houston International Film Festival, Columbus Ohio Film Festival, and the John Muir Medical Film Festival. Three films, “Broken Promises”, “Born in Africa”, and “Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo” were nominated for Emmy Awards. In addition, Zaritsky was nominated for fourteen Geminis, Canada’s national television award, and won seven. In 1995-96, he was an artist-in-residence at the graduate school of journalism, University of California at Berkeley.
Zaritsky made films from his home base in Toronto for twenty years. He moved to Vancouver in 1999 to direct the film Ski Bums (Sundance 2002) and never left the west coast. He created the production company Point Grey Pictures and since then Point Grey Pictures has produced the documentaries Men Don’t Cry: Prostate Cancer Stories, and No Kidding: The Search for the World’s Funniest Joke, both commissioned by CBC’s Witness series. Most recently, John has directed the Gemini winners College Days College Nights, The Suicide Tourist and The Wild Horse Redemption for Point Grey Pictures. His recent films have been screened at Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam), Vancouver Film Festival, South By Southwest Film Festival, Hot Docs Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival (Australia), Sedona Film Festival, Cleveland Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival (Greece) and Reykjavik International Film Festival (Iceland).
Prior to entering the film business, Zaritsky worked as a newspaper reporter for seven years. In 1970, he received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at the Washington Journalism Center for six months. In 1972, he won a National Newspaper Award for his investigative reporting at Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail.
Zaritsky divides his time between Vancouver and Whistler as he is an avid skier.
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