Yoni Brook
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“America’s Most Incarcerated City”: Directors Ted Passon, Yoni Brook and Nicole Salazar | Philly D.A.
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? When we began producing this docuseries in 2017, the national conversation around the role of systemic racism in the justice system was in a different place. Back then the city of Philadelphia, where we live, was immersed in a reckoning with its position as America’s most incarcerated big city. After a shocking election, Larry Krasner, an outsider committed to ending mass incarceration, took over the prosecutor’s office responsible for sending people to prison. We […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 2, 2021 -
DPs Yoni Brook and Joshua Z. Weinstein on Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Drama Menashe
Documentary director Joshua Z Weinstein makes his first foray into fiction filmmaking with Menashe, a drama set in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in New York City. Weinstein shot the film with co-DP Yoni Brook, a fellow documentary DP and director. With dialogue almost entirely in Yiddish, the film premiered earlier this week in the NEXT lineup at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker spoke with Weinstein and Brook before the film’s premiere. Below, the two discuss the film’s necessary blend of documentary and fiction techniques, lighting scenes for first-time actors and earning the trust of a notoriously hermetic community. Filmmaker: How […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2017
