NICOLAS ROSSIER
NICOLAS ROSSIER
NICOLAS ROSSIER
Rossier worked on dozens of feature and short documentaries as a producer and director. Most recently, he was a senior producer on the acclaimed PBS documentary Charlie vs Goliath (director Reed Lindsay). In 2012, The Oscars Library invited his film American Radical to be part of its permanent collection. The documentary won the Audience Choice Award at the IFP/Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Cinema Politica Audience Award, and the Jean Renoir Award for Best Anti-War Film. It was named one of the ten best political documentaries by Screen Junkies. For his film on the 2004 coup in Haiti (Aristide and the Endless Revolution), he won the Best Documentary and Audience Award prize at the Pan-African Film Festival (North America's most prominent Black film and arts festival). After the film's success, the late director Michael Apted invited him to join the Directors Guild of America. He then began twinning special citations from the City of Los Angeles and the California State Assembly. He also received the New York Independent Film Festival Audience Award and an honorable mention from both the UC Davis and Golden Knight film festivals for his documentary film Life is a Dream, A Street Poet in New York, about Central Park Street Poet Isidore Block, aka Poet-O.
Rossier was the first filmmaker to interview deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide while in exile in South Africa in 2004. His work on free-diving champion William Trubridge won the best original reporting on CNN. As a filmmaker, Rossier has conducted more than 100 interviews. Among them were notable personalities, including Nobel Peace Prize winners and former presidents Jimmy Carter and F.W. de Klerk, former Haiti president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, and legendary American medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer. Rossier appeared as a guest speaker at Stanford University's Media School, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Asia Society, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, where he testified with his film Brothers and Others about the negative impact of 9/11 on Muslims and Arabs in America. The documentary aired primetime eight weekends on the Hallmark Channel's Faith and Values show. In 2003, Rossier founded and produced the Swiss American Film Festival for two years as part of the Swisspeaks Festival (swissamfilmfestival.org). He's the recipient of the North Star Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Schwab Charitable Fund. Today, Rossier lives in Brooklyn with his family.
BIOGRAPHY
