Richard Ledes

No Human Is Illegal is a personal encounter with the world of the refugees detained on the Greek island of Lesvos since March 20th 2016 due to the EU-Tukey deal on the migrant crisis. The island is also referred to as Lesbos or by its capital city Mytilene. Much of the film documents in and around Moria Refugee Camp, a refugee camp that BBC News called - "The Worst Refugee Camp on Earth". Ledes' film has appeared at several international Film Festivals including The Refugees Welcome Film Festival in Berlin, and the Commffest Global Community Film and Arts Festival in Toronto. Ledes has also screened the film in person at several educational institutions followed by a Q&A with the attendees including The School of Visual Arts, and the Bard Institute for International Liberal Education in New York.

The Dark Side is an docufiction film shot in post-Hurricane Sandy New York. It is set under the faux parameters of a romantic comedy that takes place in Manhattan and is mixed with real life interviews with the firefighters from Breezy Point and Far Rockaway who lost their homes to fire and water during Hurricane Sandy. It premiered in New York in April 2015 at the Queens World Film Festival and in Paris, France at the ÉCU The European Independent Film Festival

Elliot Gould plays bird watcher and private eye Frank Turlette, who's hired—despite his initial reluctance—by an anonymous but apparently high-placed whistleblower (Frank Langella) at an international energy firm, E.N. Corporation, based in New York. He wants the detective to tail a man whom the company suspects is about to expose the company's corrupt practices in Latin America. But it turns out that the man Frank's been hired to tail and the man who hired him are one and the same. And as the two men's lives continue to intertwine, the puzzle pieces fall together, it's revealed that the man fully expects to be assassinated at any moment—and that he's haunted by a childhood incident that occurred during World War II. Less a mystery or even a corporate thriller, "The Caller" is more of an existential meditation on the meaning of life, guilt, memory and fear.

"Golden Dawn, NYC" is a short documentary about the Neo-Nazi party of Greece known as Golden Dawn and the New York City Greek community's attitude towards the party and the actions of some members of the community to combat any domestic support for fascism in Greece. The film features interviews with members of the Greek diaspora, including anarchist poet and historian Dan Georgakas. It was released online in June 2014 and attracted the attention of the party's NY supporters. The NY Golden Dawn supporters published on their website photos of the filmmaker and many of the people interviewed in the film, with anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks, pictures of relatives in some cases and what the supporters of the party believed to be the home addresses of some of the people interviewed. The article was then picked up by a US-based white supremacist website.

Fred Won't Move Out is a fiction film where Elliott Gould plays Fred, who stands at the chasm between living alone with decreasing mobility in the house where he has lived for fifty years or leaving to live closer to his wife Susan (played by Judith Roberts), who has moderate Alzheimer's and whom the children (the son played by Fred Melamed and the daughter played by Stephanie Roth Haberle) are preparing to move to a care facility closer to them. The emotional precipice on which Fred teeters at first seems most shaken by the shifting condition of his wife Susan; her own dementia and ailing health has rendered her physicality a mere shadow of her former self and, to Fred, a stark preview of that which is coming his way, too. Susan – his Susan, anyway – is on the verge of no longer being there.

"Foreclosure" is a horror film that stars Michael Imperioli, best known for his work in mob sagas The Sopranos and Goodfellas. The film was advertised with the tagline "Ghosts Don't Move Out" – a nod to the director's previous work "Fred Won't Move Out".

Richard Ledes is an American filmmaker and writer based in New York City, best known for his 2012 feature film drama Fred Won't Move Out about Alzheimer's disease starring Elliott Gould and Fred Melamed.

The film won the Made in New York award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. It was produced by Linda Moran and René Bastian.

As part of his research for his dissertation, he volunteered at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill patients. His dissertation was finished in 1996 and named "The Pure Products of America Go Crazy: The Language of Schizophrenia in the United States During the Early Cold War”.

He studied Ancient Greek, English literature and Theatre at Amherst College, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. He formed a theater group to perform plays in Ancient Greek and created a play from the last book of Iliad that was performed in the original Greek by Ledes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

Ledes' screenplay draws heavily on documents such as the New York Department of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953. Other sources are: "Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery" and "Last Resort: Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness" by Jack David Pressman. He also cites "The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness" by Jack El-Hai, which came out after "A Hole in One", as a reliable reference point.

A Hole in One is a feature film that stars Michelle Williams as a young woman who seeks out a lobotomy during the rise of the procedure in the 1950s. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003 and is distributed by "Wellspring Home Entertainment". It was produced by Alexa L. Fogel and Joseph Infantolino.

The film tells the story of young woman Anna (played by Michelle Williams) in an American suburbs of the 1950s. Her brother comes home devastated after World War II and her father rejects him. The girl is lured into a relationship with Billy, a local mob boss. When her brother dies and she witnesses Billy murder a local nightclub owner, she is driven to the edge of insanity. She develops a fixation with mental health that drives her to seek out a transorbital lobotomy. When Dr. Harold Ashton, the foremost practitioner of this brand of lobotomy, comes to town, the entire community is buzzing. He starts performing the icepick lobotomy on alcoholics, veterans and other troubled outsiders. Influenced by the hyperbole surrounding the instant cure for a range of problems, Anna announces to Bill that she wants one.