Maia Wechsler

Maia Wechsler’s film "Sisters in Resistance" was awarded Best Documentary at the Women in Cinema Film Festival in Seattle and was named one of the outstanding documentaries of 2001 by the Academy Awards Documentary Screening Committee. It has been featured at numerous international film festivals, including the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York, Boston and London, the International Women’s Film Festival in Creteil, France and Double Take Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC. "Sisters in Resistance" will be broadcast on the PBS series "Independent Lens" in the spring of 2003.

Ms. Wechsler has worked in documentary film for eight years in New York City. Prior to her work in film, she was a journalist in Paris, where her immersion in the history of France during the Nazi occupation led to her film Sisters in Resistance.

Her work in documentary film and video includes co-producer of the feature-length "Lifting the Fog: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", producer and director, "In Word and Deed", about an activist church on New York’s Lower East Side; editor, "Life Choices", a syndicated medical show; Avid editor, "Accent on the Offbeat" for Maysles Films; Avid editor, a series of TV commercials for Maysles Films; assistant editor, "Fallen Champ, the Untold Mike Tyson Story", directed by Barbara Kopple; assistant editor, "A Perfect Candidate"; assistant editor, "The Orphan Trains"; and production manager, "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kinder Transports".

As a journalist, Ms. Wechsler was special correspondent for U.S. News and World Report in Paris, for which she covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, and managing editor of Passion, an English-language Paris city monthly. Back in the United States, she was a business and arts writer at The Times, in Trenton, New Jersey. As a student in Paris and New York, she studied and wrote about the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy, France and did original research on the American government response to Vichy anti-Semitism. (10/02)

Sisters in Resistance
A film by Maia Wechsler, 2000, 60 min., Color
“This compelling documentary shares the story of four French women of uncommon courage who, in their teens and twenties, risked their lives to fight t...