Kathryn Smith Pyle
Contributor
BSR Contributor Since January 23, 2014
Kathryn Smith Pyle is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and photographer whose former career as a grantmaker in the U.S. and Latin America was dedicated to grassroots development. Her most recent film is a five-minute documentary, “Apple Forecast: Immigration Reform." She lives in Center City Philadelphia.
Kathryn Smith Pyle is a documentary filmmaker and a Sundance Institute Fellow (2011 Documentary Edit and Story Lab; 2009 Creative Producers Lab) whose former career as a grantmaker in the U.S. and Latin America was dedicated to grassroots development and giving voice to marginalized communities. Her concerns as a filmmaker continue that commitment, working in partnership with human rights groups and social movements.
Her most recent film is “Apple Forecast: Immigration Reform” (2013, 5 minutes), part of a larger project under construction: Farm Labor.
She writes for PhilanTopic, is on the board of the Flaherty Film Seminar, and has a doctorate in public policy from the University of Pennsylvania.
I grew up near a small town with a sleepy movie theater, but a boyfriend from Philadelphia took me to the Bandbox in the city’s Germantown neighborhood — where people brought their dogs and someone sold gingerbread and cider at intermission — and introduced me to Jules and Jim and Juliet of the Spirits. Then, when I saw Don't Look Back and Titicut Follies, both about subjects that I cared intensely about, I saw the potential of documentary to be all the best of fiction — but with real life on top of it. That’s stayed with me: That a great documentary film can give us all that we crave from story, can bind us to our communities, whether electric Dylan or a social justice movement, and can reach beyond the limitations of language to affect us deeply and inspire us to action.
