Gerret is a partner with his wife, Mimi Gredy, at Warner & Company (www.warnerco.com), an award-winning producer of films about education and the arts. Their work includes documentaries as well as films for college recruitment and fundraising; art exhibitions and museums. Among their clients are Smith, Stanford and Yale; Martha’s Vineyard Museum; The Culinary Institute of America; Stop Hunger Now and New England Dancing Masters.
The son of folk song collectors and documentarians Anne and Frank Warner, Gerret grew up on collecting trips to rural parts of America, watching his parents document rural singers and seeing how his father’s concert audiences responded to the songs, stories and photographs of singers. Alan Lomax called the Warners’ work “a continuous act of unpaid, tender devotion to American folk song and a life-long love affair with the people who remembered the ballads.” It was his father's interviewing technique that would later influence his documentary approach.
With his brother Jeff, he produced two audio CDs of his parents' field recordings, edited from the collection at the Library of Congress: "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still: The Warner Collection, Volume I" and Nothing Seems Better To Me: The Music of Frank Proffitt and North Carolina, The Warner Collection, Volume II" for Appleseed Recordings.
A grant from Duke University during his senior year allowed him to make a short film about Durham, North Carolina’s Union Station, and that planted the seed that led him to New York's Videotape Center where he produced scripted corporate videos, PSAs and commercials… and dreamed of alternatives. Later, after teaching guitar, then film and English, he and Mimi founded their company modeled on his parents' intimate style of documentation, producing films in their subjects' voices, without storyboard or script.
Gerret's documentaries explore themes of art, identity and continuity across generations: "Bayman," about a fisherman working with 19th century tools on the Great South Bay of Long Island; "Polly Hill and Her Arboretum," profiling a legendary horticulturist on Martha's Vineyard; "Truth Underground," following three spoken word poets in North Carolina's Triangle and "Changes in the Wind," documenting an ingenious mechanic and artist who's fanciful windmills transformed the town of Wilson, North Carolina.
Best Feature Documentary
Truth Underground
Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston
Belmont, MA
2017
NA
Truth Underground
Cucalorus Film Festival
Wilmington, NC
2016
College
Duke University
A.B. English
19641968
College
Boston University
M.S. Film Production
High School
Friend Academy, Locust Valley, NY
19601964
Birth City
New York
Current City
Chapel Hill, NC
Gender
Male
Married To
Mimi Gredy
Children
Anne, Abigail and Jessica
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