The Sturgeon Queens

Description

Official Selection at over 30 festivals including:

WINNER – Audience Choice Award Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival

WINNER – Audience Award for Best Short Doc Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival

WINNER – Audience Choice Award
San Diego Jewish Film Festival
Jerusalem Jewish Film Fest
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
Toronto Jewish Film Fest
Virginia Festival of Jewish Film
Washington, DC Jewish Film Festival
Houston Jewish Film Festival
Pittsburgh Jewish Film Festival
New Jersey Jewish Film Festival
Portland Jewish Film Festival

Synopsis

Four generations of a Jewish immigrant family create Russ and Daughters, a Lower East Side lox and herring emporium that survives and thrives. Produced to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the store, this documentary features an extensive interview with two of the original daughters for whom the store was named, now 100 and 92 years old, and interviews with prominent enthusiasts of the store including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, chef Mario Batali and 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer. Rather than a conventional narrator, the filmmakers bring together six colorful longtime fans of the store, in their 80s and 90s, who sit around a table of fish reading the script in the style of a Passover Seder.

Director

Julie Cohen is a veteran television news producer and documentary filmmaker and the founder of BetterThanFiction Productions. She has directed and produced nine documentaries for WNET, New York City’s PBS station, including two that won the 2012 New York Emmy Awards for Best Arts Program and Best Historical Program. She also produces web videos and television news segments for numerous clients.

Before starting her own production company, Julie was a staff producer at Dateline NBC for nine years, and a producer at Court TV, where she created and produced the weekly program Supreme Court Watch. Along with the New York Emmys, Julie has won two Gracie Awards including the Individual Achievement award for Best News Producer and been nominated for four national Emmys. She graduated from Colgate University and holds master’s degrees from Yale Law School and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she is now an adjunct professor.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband Paul M. Barrett, a senior feature writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and author of four non-fiction books, including the New York Times Bestseller Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.