Editor

The Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival is pleased to announce its selection of the final jury who will determine the winners of the Film Competition associated with the 2007 Festival. This year’s Festival will take place on October 1-6, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

JHWFF plays host to an unparalleled competition, celebrating the finest examples of natural history filmmaking. To win an award in Jackson is a prestigious honor. Hundreds of filmmakers and broadcasters from around the world compete in 19 categories, including the Grand Teton Award (Best of Festival). Film finalists are announced in late July, and winners are announced and honored at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony and Gala Celebration on Thursday, October 4, 2007.

This year’s final jury—Bill Broyles, Ron Devillier, Carol Fleisher, Michael Rosenberg and Dyanna Taylor—will select the winners from 48 finalists in 16 categories. The final judges for the “Best Achievement in Sound,” “Best Achievement in Editing” and “Best Achievement in Writing” categories will be judged by special peer committees.

Brief biographies on the members of the 2007 Festival final jury are included below:

William (Bill) Broyles, Jr. grew up in Baytown, Texas and attended Rice University and then Oxford University. s a Marshall Scholar. He worked actively in the civil rights movement and finished out the Sixties as a Marine infantry lieutenant in Vietnam. As the founding editor of Texas Monthly and editor-in-chief of Newsweek, Broyles has published in the New York Times, Atlantic, and Esquire as well as many other newspapers and magazines. He wrote the book Brothers in Arms, and was the co-creator of the television series China Beach. He also wrote the original screenplay for Cast Away and the screenplay for Jarhead. He has co-authored six other screenplays including Apollo 13, Unfaithful, The Polar Express and Flags of Our Fathers. Broyles has lectured and taught at UCLA, USC, Rice, NYU, Columbia University, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Smithsonian, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 2002, he was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame.

Ron Devillier is credited with introducing Monty Python's Flying Circus to American audiences. In 1977, he joined PBS as Director of Program Acquisitions. Later, he was named Vice President of Network Programming, a position that made him responsible for all network productions, acquisitions and scheduling. Devillier established Devillier Donegan Enterprises with Brian Donegan, which launched ABC/Kane Productions International's award winning twenty-four part series, The Living Edens, on PBS. Over the next ten years, DDE became a major developer, producer and distributor of documentary productions, working with some of the world’s leading filmmakers. During that period, Devillier was also the architect and principal negotiator of the development deal signed with PBS to produce over 60 hours of programming. The highlight of that partnership was the creation of the acclaimed 40-hour Empires series, a collection of documentary films that explored the history of ancient civilizations and the legacy of their leaders who continue to influence our world today.

Carol L. Fleisher has spent the last thirty years making lauded documentaries for television. Her film, Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry, was honored with an Emmy. She is the proud recipient of the Writers’ Guild of America Award for her film, The White House Tapes. Carol’s six-hour telling of The Revolutionary War, narrated by Charles Kuralt, won the Cable ACE Award for Best Documentary Series. She is one of only two documentary filmmakers to be honored with the prestigious Humanitas Prize for two consecutive years. Her work has garnered her eight Cine Golden Eagles, a Golden Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival, a Gold Award from the Houston Film Festival, two Genesis Awards and two Emmy Awards.

Michael Rosenberg was born in South Africa but moved to the UK to begin his career as an assistant Film Editor for the BBC in 1969. Three years later, he produced his first natural history program as part of the World About Us series. In 1974, he founded Partridge Films, the production company that went on to become world-renowned for producing high quality wildlife documentaries, including Okavango – Jewel of the Kalahari, the Channel 4 series Fragile Earth, and Korup – An African Rainforest. Rosenberg has won more Wildscreen Golden Panda Awards than any other filmmaker, as well as several awards at the JHWFF. He has also won two Emmy Awards and the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement. In 1996, he established Peartree Films, a natural history film production company based in South Africa.

Dyanna Taylor has been a filmmaker for over twenty-five years and is widely known for her award-winning cinematography. After producing local documentaries with her first company, Taylor/Franklin Films in San Francisco, Taylor moved to New York for her first network assignment as producer and cinematographer for the ABC documentary covering the American women’s climbing expedition to Annapurna. More recently, her work has taken her to the Southwest to direct and produce The Light Within, on James Turrell’s Roden Crater and Vanished for the Wild Life Adventures series. As Director of Photography, Taylor’s credits include: Homeland, the 2005 winner of the JWFF Best of Festival Award, Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea, and the Peabody Award-winning Winter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea and Winter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald are American Masters projects. She was director of photography for NOVA’s Evolution series, PBS’s Great Performers series, Swingin’ With the Duke documentary, the feature documentary, High Fidelity, and 500 Nations, the eight-part CBS mini-series staring Kevin Costner, as well as Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Taylor is an Emmy and Academy Award winner, and was honored with the MUSE Award for “Outstanding Vision and Achievement in Cinematography” from New York Women in Film and Television.