Mitchell Block is an American filmmaker, primarily a producer of documentary films. He was executive producer of the 2000 shortdocumentary filmBig Mama, which won Best Documentary at the 73rd Academy Awards. He produced the 2010 film Poster Girl, which was nominated in the same category at the 83rd Academy Awards. He also produced The Testimony and executive produced Women of the Gulag, which were shortlisted in the Best Documentary category at the 88th Academy Awards and the 91st Academy Awards, respectively..
Block began to work in television and film. He became particularly interested in documentaries. He established his own company, Direct Cinema, in 1974, of which he is president. It produces and distributes films. Since 1980, Block has been on the 40-person Documentary Screening Committee of the Academy Awards. They nominate the short list of finalists for awards.
In 1990, a group of 45 filmmakers filed a protest to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over a potential conflict of interest involving Block. They noted that Block was a member of the Documentary Steering Committee, which selects films as nominees, but he had a conflict of interest because his company Direct Cinema owned the distribution rights to three of the five films selected that year as nominees for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. They noted that Michael Moore's Roger & Me was omitted from the nominees, although it had been highly praised by numerous critics and was ranked by many critics as one of the top ten films of the year.
Works
Block produced the documentary The Testimony, which chronicled the 2014 Minova Trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was short listed for a 2015 Academy Award. His 2010 film Poster Girl was also nominated for Academy Award for Best Documentary. He was executive producer for the film Big Mama, which won an Academy Award for a documentary short. Among the films and documentary series that Block has conceived, created and produced are Carrier and Another Day in Paradise, both of which were broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service and the National Geographic Channel internationally. Carrier received an Emmy Award in 2009 for Best Cinematography in a prime time series. In 2008, Block's short film No Lies was selected for the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress. Only a handful of the 550 films on the registry are short films made by students. In 2016, film critics for the website IndieWire selected No Lies as one of the ten best short films ever made.
