"Jean Seberg: Actress Activist Icon" is an Official Selection at the 2022 AMDocs Film Festival in Palm Springs, California. The film was co-produced by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Garry McGee of McMarr, LTD and Mid-America Emmy award-winning filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle of Fourth Wall Films. The feature-length documentary will screen Sunday, April 10, 2:00 p.m. at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, 2100 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way. Visit amdocfilmfest.com for more information.
AmDocs takes place annually in Palm Springs, California and has honored such film industry notables as Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter, and producer Oliver Stone, five-time Grammy winner Dionne Warwick, Oscar-nominated director Julie Cohen, actor and humanitarian George Takei, actor Peter Coyote, Oscar-nominated director and Grammy winner Peter Bogdanovich, director Joe Berlinger, actor Pierce Brosnan, and others.
Marshalltown, Iowa’s Jean Seberg made her acting debut at age 18 in Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan and starred in Hollywood films Lilith, Paint Your Wagon, and the blockbuster Airport, among others. She is best known for her performance with co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo in director Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking French New Wave film Breathless.
Seberg’s offscreen civil rights activism and her financial support for the Black Panther Party made her a target of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO and their plan to “neutralize” her initiated a downward spiral leading to her mysterious and untimely death in Paris.
“The documentary strips away the Hollywood gossip, the national media hype, and the F.B.I. propaganda to find a young woman of conscience embroiled in the important issues of her day, while also carving out a unique and important international film career,” said producer Kelly Rundle.
“Jean Seberg: Actress Activist Icon” is the first documentary film to focus on the private side of the international movie star, combining exclusive interviews with Jean’s family, including her sister Mary Ann Seberg and former husband François Moreuil; co-star Mylene Demongeot, director Nicolas Gessner, and former Black Panther Party leader and Jean’s friend Elaine Brown. The film features never-before-seen private photographs, home movie footage, and original music by musicians Mark and Amy Adams-Westin of Amy & Adams.
“She was a person, like all of us, who made good choices and bad choices,” said producer Garry McGee. “There were things that happened to her that she didn’t deserve. Jean was just trying to do what was right. You see a consistent thread throughout her life of reaching out to people who had fewer opportunities than she had.”
“Jean Seberg: Actress Activist Icon” was funded in part with grants from Humanities Iowa, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Iowa Arts Council. The Historical Society of Marshall County served as a fiscal sponsor for the project.
AmDocs has been recognized internationally as an important venue for filmmakers, being named by MovieMaker Magazine as one of the five coolest documentary film festivals in the world and one of the Top 50 Film Festivals in the World Worth the Entry Fee for Filmmakers! Since 2019, AmDocs has been consistently named one of the Top 100 Best Reviewed Film Festivals in the World by FilmFreeway.com.
The Rundles’ films have won a regional Emmy® and received nine Mid-America Emmy® nominations. Garry McGee is the author of “Jean Seberg: Breathless” and co-author of “Neutralized: The FBI vs Jean Seberg” and “The Films of Jean Seberg”. He received a regional Emmy® nomination for the documentary The Last Wright.
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