Marc Levin is a fiercely independent and fearless filmmaker. Whether he is directing a documentary or a drama, he succeeds in fashioning a story that is authentic, visceral and powerful. You feel Marc's films. They connect your head to your heart and soul.
Marc has won most of the industry’s top awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the Camera D’Or at Cannes, four Emmys and four duPont-Columbia Awards.
His dramatic feature film, SLAM, a searing prison drama starring Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn and Bonz Malone, received international recognition for its seamless blending of the real world with a narrative flow. Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Brace yourself for a slam-dunk of a movie, in an in-your-face cinema verite-style that makes Godard's 'Breathless' seem like a cartoon." SLAM won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera D'Or at Cannes in 1998.
Most recently he directed An American Bombing - The Road to April 19th about the surge in political violence through the story of the Oklahoma City bombing; Executively Produced by Katie Couric. It premiered on HBO April 16th and within days hit #1 on Max’s top 10 streaming movies. It clearly touched a nerve.
Other recent films include It’s Basic, a film about no-strings-attached, guaranteed income for low-income workers; Stockton on My Mind following 29-year-old Mayor Michael Tubbs’ bold initiatives to provide more opportunities for the youth of his city; and I Promise, which chronicle the first year of the innovative Akron public school created by LeBron James and his foundation.
It's Basic is currently being screened by advocates in local venues across the country. Stockton and I Promise were both selected for World Premieres at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. I Promise was honored by the African American Film Critics Association as the Best Short Form Series of 2020 and Stockton on My Mind was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs documentary.
Brick City, a groundbreaking docu-series about the city of Newark, followed Mayor Cory Booker and the people on the frontlines of a city struggling to change. Executive produced with Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker, the five-hour series aired its first season on the Sundance Channel in September 2009. It won the 2010 Peabody Award, was nominated for an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking, received a 2010 Golden Eagle Cine Award and an NAACP Image Award. The second season premiered on January 30, 2011. TV Guide wrote, “Brick City plays like a verité version of The Wire, one of TV's finest series ever. It is the ultimate reality show.”
Street Time, a television series produced by Columbia/Tristar for Showtime, received critical acclaim for its authenticity and verite style. Marc executive produced the series and directed ten episodes. The show starred Rob Morrow, Scott Cohen, Erica Alexander and Terrence Howard. The Los Angeles Times called it "some of the most seductive television ever: vivid, distinctive, explosive storytelling …”
The documentary feature, Godfathers and Sons, was part of the highly regarded Martin Scorsese PBS series, The Blues. Scorsese recruited an international team of directors with both feature and documentary experience: Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Richard Pierce and Wim Wenders. Variety called Marc’s show “the crown jewel in the Scorsese series.”
In the late nineties, he directed Whiteboys, a black comedy about white kids who want to be black rappers, starring Danny Hoch, Dash Mihok, Mark Webber and Piper Perabo. He followed it with Brooklyn Babylon, a fable inspired by the “Song of Songs,” starring Tariq Trotter and Bonz Malone, and featuring music by the legendary Grammy winners The Roots.
In Twilight Los Angeles, an adaptation of Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show, he fused a Broadway play with a documentary look at the LA riots. Twilight premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 and was selected as the opening film of the International Human Rights Film Festival at Lincoln Center. In 1992 he directed Oscar nominee Robert Downey, Jr. in The Last Party, a gonzo look at the Presidential campaign, weaving together the personal and the political fortunes of Downey and Bill Clinton.
Marc and his documentary film partner, Daphne Pinkerson, have a thirty-year working relationship with HBO. An American Bombing, released in 2024, was the 21st film they made for the network. In 2021, Marc was the executive producer on two HBO films, Adrienne, about the life and death of actress Adrienne Shelly, directed by her widower, Andy Ostroy, and The Slow Hustle, about police corruption in Baltimore, directed by The Wire actress, Sonja Sohn. Other films include One Nation Under Stress, a film made in 2019 with Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, that looked at the spike in mortality among white working class people; Class Divide, about the hyper-gentrification of Chelsea in NYC as a microcosm of economic changes in urban areas around the world, which won the DOC NYC Grand Jury Prize; and Hard Times: Lost on Long Island, about white-collar professionals hit by the Great Recession that premiered on HBO in July 2012. Hard Times won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the Hamptons International Film Festival and was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting – Long Form. The Baltimore Sun wrote, “One of the most important hours of TV that the medium will offer this year.”
TRIANGLE: Remembering the Fire, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist fire of 1911, won a duPont-Columbia Award in 2011. SCHMATTA: Rags to Riches to Rags, told the story of what happened to manufacturing in America through the rise and fall of the fabled Garment Center in NYC, and premiered in October 2009. Heir to an Execution, a documentary feature following Ivy Meeropol’s journey on the 50th anniversary of the execution of her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was in competition at the Sundance film festival and debuted on HBO in 2004. During the 1990’s, Marc and Daphne produced a number of films for HBO’s AMERICA UNDERCOVER series, including Mob Stories, Prisoners of the War on Drugs, Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, Soldiers in the Army of God, and Gladiator Days. Thug Life in D.C. won the 1999 National Emmy for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special. Gang War: Bangin' in Little Rock won the CableACE Award for Best Documentary Special of 1994. The sequel, Back in the Hood, premiered on HBO ten years later.
For HBO Sports, Marc produced and directed Prayer for a Perfect Season, on the top high school basketball team in the country. It premiered in the Fall of 2011.
In 1997, Marc was awarded the duPont-Columbia award for CIA: America's Secret Warriors, a three-part series that aired on the Discovery Channel.
Marc has also produced and directed a number of television specials for one of America's most respected journalists, Bill Moyers. Among them was The Secret Government - The Constitution in Crisis, which won a national Emmy. The Home Front with Bill Moyers was honored with the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton Award. Their most recent film, Rikers: An American Jail, won the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award for Media Advocacy.
Marc made his on-camera debut in Protocols of Zion, his street-level look at the rise of anti-Semitism since 9/11 and the renewed popularity of the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in the fall of 2005 and on HBO the spring of 2006.
Mr. Untouchable, the story of the Black Godfather, Harlem heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes, was released in theaters in 2007. It tells the true-life story of a real American Gangster from the point of view of law enforcement, associates, and Nicky Barnes himself, appearing for the first time in over a quarter century. "It makes American Gangster look like a fairy tale," declared E!
Marc has also assumed the role of Executive Producer on a number of projects. In 2008 he was Executive Producer alongside Beyoncé Knowles on Cadillac Records, the Chess Records story starring Jeffrey Wright, Adrian Brody, and Beyoncé. In the same year he executive produced the indie feature documentary Captured, produced by his son Daniel Levin and his colleagues Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst.
It tells the story of artist/activist Clayton Patterson, the man who video-taped the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot and who has dedicated his life to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness in New York City's Lower East Side, a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. Marc executive produced a follow-up feature in 2010, Dirty Old Town, directed by his son, Daniel B. Levin, and Jenner Furst.
Marc continued his docu-series work with three projects. BET’s Second Coming? Will Black America Decide 2012? was part of the Network’s election campaign coverage and won the 2013 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism.
Jersey Strong, a 10-part docu-soap set in Newark, New Jersey, premiered September 2013 on Participant Media’s new cable network, Pivot.
Marc was also the executive producer on Kevin Garnett: Anything Is Possible, for Showtime. And he teamed up with Robert Redford on two docu-series, Chicagoland and Ocean Warriors.
His scripted work includes periodically directing episodes of Law & Order for Dick Wolf and in 2017 they teamed up on the six-hour docu-series Inside the FBI: New York.
In 1980 Marc and his father, Al Levin, teamed up on Portrait of An American Zealot - a behind the scenes look at Ed McAteer, the man who helped bring the Christian fundamentalist movement into the Republican Party. The film is now part of the Museum of Modern Arts permanent film collection
View Marc’s Full Filmography in our Archive
