CARVALHO’S JOURNEY

Dir. Steve Rivo
(85 min, USA, 2015)
Documentary
Mid-Atlantic Premiere

At a time when the US was busy pushing and re-defining its borders, the nascent medium of photography was just starting to take root. At the center of this artistic and geographic expansion stood an observant Sephardic Jew from South Carolina, Solomon Carvalho (1815-1897).

Accomplished documentarian Steve Rivo traces Carvalho’s 1853 expedition alongside famed explorer John Fremont, when Carvalho became among the first to capture the mesas, sweeping vistas and astounding raw beauty of the American West.

Director Steve Rivo will also be joining us for a Library of Congress clip talk.

Co-presented by the Art Museum of the Americas and The Foundation for Jewish Studies

Reframing the Artist - Exploring the artists’ experience through film.

Filmmaker Steve Rivo has produced, directed or written projects for PBS, CNN, MTV, MSNBC, Discovery, Investigation Discovery, The Weather Channel, Court TV/TruTV and VH1, and for filmmakers Alex Gibney, Robert Redford and Ric Burns. Rivo was a producer of New York: A Documentary Film, Eugene O’Neil and Ansel Adams for PBS, senior producer of The Vice Guide To Everything, and a writer/director for the CNN series Death Row Stories. His documentaries have garnered Emmys, Du-Pont-Columbia, Peabody, IDA, Telly and Cine Golden Eagle awards. Rivo also teaches in the MFA program at Hofstra University.

Joshua Speiser is currently the Program and Operations Manager of The Documentary Center at George Washington University. He has a wealth of experience in the film and higher education fields including three years as Public Relations and Events Manager and then five years as Director of Communications in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University. He also served for four years as the Assistant Director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival and was the Volunteer Manager of the SILVERDOCS (now AFIDOCS) Film Festival. He has produced documentaries of his own and is highly active in the film community in and around Washington, DC.

“[E]qually impressive for the peculiar moment in art history it explores as well as for the way it captures the contribution of an observant Sephardic Jew to the history of the American West. This documentary is a very rare treat.” -Huffington Post