Kurt Kuenne

Kurt Kuenne is an awardwinning filmmaker and composer of both fiction and documentary films He is a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing and where he also studied film scoring at the USC School of Music under the tutelage of classic film composers Buddy Baker and David Raksin His first feature the teen drama Scrapbook 1999 landed him on Filmmaker magazines 25 New Faces of Indie Film feature and he followed it with DriveIn Movie Memories 2001 a documentary about outdoor movies which opened the 2001 Telluride Film Festival and played nationally on PBS In 2002 he won the AMPAS Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his screenplay Mason Mule while his screenplay Explode made the quarterfinals in the same year He then directed a series of black white short musical comedies RentAPerson 2003Validation 2006 Slow 2007 and The Phone Book 2008 which won 40 awards at 120 film festivals worldwide In 2008 he completed his 6 year passion project the documentary Dear Zachary A Letter To A Son About His Father which premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival The film was released by Oscilloscope Laboratories and MSNBC Films was named one of the Top 5 Documentaries of 2008 by the National Board of Review won numerous awards and placed on more than 40 critics lists of the Ten Best Films of 2008 In 2012 PBS POV named it one of the 100 Greatest Documentaries of All Time Dear Zachary inspired the creation of Bill C464 in Canadian Parliament which reformed Canadas criminal code when it became law on December 15 2010 An epilogue chronicling this process The Legacy of Dear Zachary A Journey to Change Law was released on the web in 2013 In 2011 he collaborated for the second time with actor TJ Thyne Validation Bones on the fiction feature Shuffle a mysteryfantasy about a man who begins experiencing his life out of order which was released by Screen Media Films and won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide including the 2013 Frank Capra Award In 2014 he cowrote edited and sound designed the celebrated documentary Batkid Begins for his Emmywinning director pal Dana Nachman The film premiered once again at the Slamdance Film Festival won 5 audience awards and was acquired by Warner Bros PicturesNew Line Cinema who released it theatrically on June 26 2015 Julia Roberts acquired the films remake rights Kurt has since directed numerous episodes of the hit NBC television show The Blacklist starring James Spader His work as a composer includes rescoring the restoration of the silent classic Cyrano de Bergerac 1925 and writing the book music and lyrics for an awardwinning stage musical adaptation of the New York Timesbestselling novel The Looking Glass Wars Kurt is managed by Good Fear Film and Management