Jeremy S. Levine’s films explore race, class, and trauma, and seek to unearth buried tragedies in a society in active denial of its own past. An Emmy award-winning filmmaker and two-time Sundance Institute fellow, his work has screened at over one hundred film festivals around the world including the Berlinale, Tribeca, and Sundance, streamed on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sundance Now, and Hulu, broadcast nationally in nine countries, and received over a dozen festival awards.
His last feature documentary, For Ahkeem, is a love story set against the backdrop of the Ferguson uprising and the school-to-prison pipeline. For Ahkeem played as an official selection of over 60 film festivals where it won 10 awards, including 8 “Best Documentary Awards.” The film was named in Top 10 Lists by both Entertainment Weekly and People and was included on the “Unforgettables” List by the Cinema Eye Honors, a list that IndieWire wrote “helped to define documentary cinema in 2017.”
He recently released The Panola Project, a short film that chronicles the journey of the unstoppable Dorothy Oliver to vaccinate her rural, Black town of Panola, AL from the convenience store she runs out of a mobile home. Nearly 99% of adults in her town have received the shot in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. The film was released with The New Yorker, featured on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and The Last Word, written about in over 50 publications including USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and People. The Panola Project received Audience Awards at GlobeDocs and the Sidewalk Film Festival, where Dorothy was honored with the Spirit of Sidewalk award. The film was an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2006, Levine co-founded the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective (BFC), a community of professional filmmakers dedicated to collaboration and mutual support. He is currently developing projects about a former white supremacist turned vagabond clown, a personal documentary-horror film, and a hybrid film highlighting the deep bond between two men who met in prison.