An award-winning filmmaker, Phil Bertelsen works in both fiction and non-fiction.
His narrative feature debut, Rock the Paint, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received the Creative Promise Award. He produced the Peabody Award-winning Chisholm ’72 – Unbought & Unbossed. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, it was broadcast nationally on public television. His first film, Around the Time, was a drama honored with several awards, including a Student Academy Award while his next film The Sunshine also won numerous festival awards including a Director’s Guild East Award. Additionally, Bertelsen wrote and directed Outside Looking In, an hour-long documentary examining transracial adoption in America airing on PBS. Beyond The Steps premiered on Great Performance’s Dance In America series.
Becca Bender began her career working on narrative features such as America’s Sweethearts and Tortilla Soup. She crossed into documentary on PBS’s Frontline episode Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. Bender was the associate producer of the Peabody Award-winning Chisholm ’72 – Unbought & Unbossed which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the award-winning Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela. Both films were broadcast on public television as part of the POV series.
Lillian Benson, A.C.E. was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the landmark civil right series Eyes On The Prize II. Benson has edited numerous documentaries for HBO, CNN, The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, and PBS. Her feature film credits include Au Pair Chocolat, Soliloquy, Alma's Rainbow, and Twisted. Ms. Benson is the first African American female member of American Cinema Editors, the honorary society of film editors and serves on their board of directors.
Award-winning cinematographer Maryse Alberti has worked extensively in both documentary and fiction filmmaking. Alberti won the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance in 1990 for the documentary H-2 Worker and again in 1995 for Crumb. Her work on Velvet Goldmine earned her a 1999 Independent Spirit Award for Cinematography. Other credits include Incident at Oglala, Happiness, Tape, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and We Don’t Live Here Anymore also nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography.
John Foster has split his career between narrative features and non-fiction films, including several projects on which he collaborated with the director Phil Bertelsen. Among his fiction films, Sunday and Keane earned him nominations for Independent Spirit Awards. Sunday won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Tully was nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards. Foster’s documentary films include Resident Alien, Outside Looking In, The Green Monster, Innocent Until Proven Guilty and the Sundance contenders My Knees Were Jumping and The Trials of Darryl Hunt.
DANCE PHILM presents
a BERTELSEN PHILM "BEYOND THE STEPS Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater"
featuring JUDITH JAMISON and ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
with ROBERT BATTLE and RENNIE HARRIS Directors of Photography MARYSE ALBERTI and JOHN FOSTER
Original Music by DARRIN ROSS Music Supervisor BILL COLEMAN Live Performance Editor GIRISH BHARGAVA
Editor LILLIAN E. BENSON, A.C.E. Co-Producer BECCA BENDER
Produced and Directed by PHIL BERTELSEN
