Jennifer Fox

In 2018, Fox directed the film The Tale (2018), inspired by her own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse. Unlike her previous works, the film is not a documentary but a narrative film, with the script inspired by transcripts of real conversations. The film features Academy Award-winning actress Laura Dern, and premiered at the Sundance film festival on January 20, 2018 and on HBO on May 26, 2018. The plot of the film directly references Fox's own experience of recognizing and grappling with her own abuse history.

The Tale was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2018, the best international film at the Munich Film Festival, the best Narrative Feature at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and for Outstanding Television Movie at the 2018 Primetime Emmy Awards.

Fox spent the next five years filming her third documentary Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2006), another made for TV documentary series, consisting of six hour-long segments. Combining personal memoir with cinéma vérité-style filming, "pass the camera" shooting, interviews and narration, Fox attempts to understand her own identity as a woman in relation to women around the world. Loosely organized around her own affair with an unnamed married South African lover and her familial upbringing, Fox supplements her own experience with clips from over 1,600 hours' worth of interviews and footage of women around the world and their experience of being a woman. Revolving around what Fox defines as "this modern female life," Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, represents a sort of feminist manifesto for Fox. The film itself has been met by some criticism regarding its comparative qualities, with Zoe Williams questioning whether it is all that productive to compare experiences of oppression and Fox's centralized role.

Fox's fourth documentary film My Reincarnation (2011) was filmed over the course of 20 years. After the struggle of filming and promoting Beirut: The Last Home Movie, Fox began travelling with Buddhist master Namkhai Norbu, in 1989, as his secretary. As she was introduced to his 18-year-old son, Yeshi, Fox began recording their lives. After leaving to work on other projects, Fox reconnected with Namkhai and returned 13 years later to film Yeshi and his father as they struggle to connect and balance modern life and traditional beliefs. The film was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign for $150,456 after one of Fox's original backers fell through. Due to the gap in filming, the documentary fluctuates between an interview based style and cinéma vérité. The film was first released in the U.S. on June 21, 2006 on PBS's POV series.

Fox's next project, An American Love Story (1999), was inspired by her own experiences of racism towards interracial relationships. While dating a black man in the early '90s, her shock towards the racism from strangers and family inspired her to create the cinéma vérité documentary about Bill Sims and Karen Wilson's interracial relationship. The 10-part series first aired on September 12, 1999 on PBS and ran for five consecutive nights. Filming lasted over a year and a half, as Fox and one other crew member moved into the couple's Queen's apartment to chronicle their daily lives. Generating over 1,000 hours of film, the documentary covers everything from the Bill's fluctuating career as a musician and Karen's declining health to the serious disapproval and ostracization the couple faced as they attempt to raise their family. The film won a Gracie Award for best Television Series in 2000, and was named "One of the Top Ten Television Series of 1999" by The New York Times.

Fox's first film Beirut: The Last Home Movie won the Grand Prize for Best Documentary film and the prize for Best Cinematography at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival. It also won Le Premier Prix for Best Documentary at the 1988 Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris. Her second documentary, An American Love Story won a Gracie Award for Best Television Series and was named "One of the Top Ten Television Series of 1999" by The New York Times, Time, The New York Daily News, Time Out, and The Boston Globe. My Reincarnation won an Audience Award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2013. She has produced award winning films like Love and Diane; On the Ropes; Double Exposure; Cowboys, Lawyers and Indians; Absolutely Safe; and Project Ten: Real Stories From a Free South Africa. Additionally, she co-wrote the Academy Award-nominated film The Messenger. Her most recent film, The Tale, was nominated for two Emmy Awards and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It won for best screenplay and editing at the Durban International Film Festival, and Laura Dern has won for Best Actress in Movie/Limited Series at the Gold Derby Awards and OFTA Television Awards.

After dropping out of NYU in 1981, Fox accompanied friend and classmate Gaby Bustros to her ancestral home in Beirut, a 200-year-old Ottoman palace that had been bombed during the Lebanese Civil War. Here, she filmed the documentary Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987). A cinéma vérité-style documentary, Fox follows the Bustros family as they continue to live in their ruined mansion and survive the civil war. While the film was a critical success, winning for best Cinematography and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1988, Fox suffered post traumatic stress disorder upon finishing the film.

Fox knew she wanted to be a filmmaker from a young age after seeing the film Funny Girl, for an aunt's birthday. In 1980 she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Creative Writing, and in 1981 dropped out of New York University to film Beirut: The Last Home Movie.

Jennifer Fox (born 1959) is an American film producer, director, cinematographer, and writer as well as president of A Luminous Mind Film Productions. She won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her first feature documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Her 2010 documentary My Reincarnation had its premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2010, where it won a Top 20 Audience Award.

Jennifer Fox was born into a Jewish family in 1959 in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her father, Richard J. Fox, was a U.S. Navy pilot who served in the Korean War and co-founded Fox Companies, a property construction firm in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Her mother, Geraldine Dietz Fox, after losing hearing in her left ear at the age of 27, helped to establish the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and founded the National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation (NOHR) in 1988. One of five children, Fox attended primary school at the Quaker Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia.