John Zaritsky (born 1943) is a Canadian documentarian film maker. He was the recipient of an Academy Award in 1982 for his documentary Just Another Missing Kid. He also won a Cable Ace Award in 1987 for Rapists: Can They be Stopped, a Golden Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for My Husband is Going to Kill Me, a Robert F. Kennedy Foundation Award for “Born in Africa”, and an DuPont-Columbia Award in 1994 for Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo.
Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and a graduate of Denis Morris Catholic High School in 1961, he studied at the University of Toronto. Prior to entering film, Zaritsky worked as a newspaper reporter for seven years. In 1970, he received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at the Washington Journalism Center. In 1972, he won a National Newspaper Award for his investigative reporting at the Globe and Mail newspaper.
His films have won awards at the New York Film Festival, the American Film Festival, Banff Television Festival, Houston International Film Festival, Columbus Ohio Film Festival, and the John Muir Medical Film Festival. Three films, “Broken Promises”, “Born in Africa”, and “Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo” were nominated for Emmy Awards. In addition, Zaritsky has won six Geminis, Canada’s national television award. In 1995-96, he was an artist-in-residence at the graduate school of journalism, University of California at Berkeley.
He also directed and produced the documentary Right to Die?, which documented the assisted suicide of Craig Ewert by the group Dignitas. The film also features a discussion of the case of Betty and George Coumbias, a Canadian couple seeking legal approval for their suicide pact.
Right to Die? attracted extraordinary publicity in Britain when it aired in December 2008. According to the Associated Press, "The documentary ... has been shown on Canadian and Swiss TV and at numerous film festivals, where it provoked little controversy. But it struck a raw nerve in Britain, where the divisive debate over assisted suicide remains unresolved."
Famous quotes containing the word john:
“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child’s duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”
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