Jonathan Jakubowicz


Jonathan Jakubowicz is a Venezuelan filmmaker and writer, whose film Secuestro Express was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the British Independent Film Awards and was a New York Times "Critics' Pick" in 2005. He is of Polish-Jewish descent.

Career

Secuestro Express became the nation's biggest box office hit at that time, to the dismay of then-President Hugo Chávez, whose government opened two trials against Jakubowicz, who was forced to leave Venezuela.
His film, Hands of Stone, is about the relationship between Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán and his trainer Ray Arcel. Hands of Stone premiered in the Cannes Film Festival 2016 and was warmly received with a 15-minute standing ovation. It's the first Latin movie to have a simultaneous wide release in all of Latin America.
Hands of Stone also landed Jakubowicz in political activism when it was invited and then pulled from the official selection of the Havana Film Festival after Jakubowicz made comments denouncing censorship for Cuban filmmakers in the Island.
His latest film Resistance starring Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Ed Harris, Edgar Ramirez, Clemence Poesy and others. It tells the story of a group of boys and girls scouts who saved thousands of orphans during the Holocaust. One of them was the legendary resistance fighter Georges Loinger, who met with Jakubowicz and helped him with the research of the film, before he died on December 28, 2018. Georges Loinger was the first cousin of Marcel Marceau and died at 108 years of age.

Novels

In November 2016, Jakubowicz published his first novel Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, which became a best seller in the Spanish language market. In Venezuela, the book broke sales records and was read in public gatherings, as well as on a community of fifty thousand people that define themselves as "resistance to the Maduro dictatorship ", on the app Zello.
In July 2020, Jakubowicz published La Venganza de Juan Planchard, the sequel to his first novel. It immediately rose to the #1 spot in of Best Sellers in Spanish Language Fiction, in Amazon.
Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard was adapted for the stage by 2016 National Medal of Arts award winning theater director Moisés Kaufman at Manhattan’s Tectonic Theater Project.