Goucher College Presents the Charles Guggenheim Documentary Film Festival

Release date: April 30, 2008 |

Goucher College will screen highlights from the award-winning filmography of Charles Guggenheim, followed by a panel discussion about his legacy as a central figure in American documentary filmmaking.

The Charles Guggenheim Documentary Film Festival will be held Wednesday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m. in Kelley Lecture Hall. This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved by calling 410-337-6333 or by e-mailing boxoffice@goucher.edu.

The panelists will be Nsenga Burton, multi-media producer and professor of communications and media studies at Goucher College; Grace Guggenheim, producer and executive producer with Guggenheim Productions Inc.; Ann Hornaday, film critic for The Washington Post; and Sanford J. Ungar, president of Goucher College.

Guggenheim’s four Academy Award-winning films — “Nine From Little Rock,” “Robert Kennedy Remembered,” “The Johnstown Flood,” and “A Time for Justice” — will be screened on Saturday, May 3, 1-3:30 p.m. in Van Meter B-10. This film screening is also free and open to the public.

In 1954, Charles Guggenheim, a 29-year-old television producer and director, founded his own small film production studio in St. Louis. In the early 1960s, he formed a partnership with television and documentary film producer Shelby Storck, with whom he collaborated on several documentaries that were nominated for and/or won Academy Awards.

Guggenheim received his first Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for 1964’s “Nine from Little Rock,” about the desegregation effort in Arkansas in 1957. Storck and Guggenheim also collaborated on a well-received political film for Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp in 1966.

That year, Guggenheim moved his company and his family to Washington, D.C., where he became a media advisor to many Democratic political figures. He worked on four presidential campaigns and hundreds of gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns.

Guggenheim worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign; after Sen. Kennedy was assassinated, his family asked Guggenheim to put together a tribute for the 1968 Chicago Convention. It was completed in less than two months and was shown at the convention and broadcast simultaneously. The convention hall came to a standstill for 20 minutes. The resulting film, “Robert Kennedy Remembered” (1968), won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film.

Although Guggenheim occasionally ventured into feature and political film production, he stayed mostly with documentary films. He won two more Oscars for short-subject documentary filmmaking for “The Johnstown Flood” (1989) and “A Time for Justice,” a film about the civil rights movement (1995). He received 12 Academy Award nominations during his career.

His last documentary, “Berga: Soldiers of Another War,” was produced with his daughter and colleague, Grace Guggenheim. The film tells the little-known story about a group of 350 American soldiers captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge who, because they were Jewish or the Nazis thought they “looked Jewish,” were sent to slave labor camp and worked beside civilian political prisoners. Guggenheim finished the film six weeks before his death in October 2002 from pancreatic cancer; it aired in 2003 on PBS.

Guggenheim’s son, Davis, also became a document filmmaker and won an Oscar for best documentary in 2007 for “An Inconvenient Truth.”