Michael Chandler is an Academy-Award nominated filmmaker, working in non-fiction and fiction film. Knee Deep is a feature documentary about a Maine farm boy who tries to kill his mother when she sells the family farm. The film won four Best Documentary Awards, including the prestigious Maysles Brothers Award, and aired on PBS Independent Lens. Michael’s film Forgotten Fires, on the burning by Ku Klux Klansmen of Black churches in South Carolina, aired on over 250 PBS stations. Bill Moyers said about it: “If we wanted a real dialog about race in America, we’d start with this film.” Michael has also produced and directed documentaries for the PBS series Frontline, including Blackout, a co-production with The New York Times, The Future of War, an examination of the Army’s ability to meet emerging military threats, and Secrets of the SAT, which won First Prize in Broadcast Journalism from the Education Writer’s Association. He wrote and edited the documentaries Freedom on My Mind(Academy Award Nomination, Sundance Grand Jury Prize), Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (Emmy Award), and Can’t It Be Anyone Else?, for which he received the Christopher Humanitarian Award and the ACE award for Best Documentary Editing. He edited Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (Academy Nomination), The Squires of San Quentin (Academy Nomination), and served as consulting editor and co-writer on The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Academy Nomination). Michael has also edited feature films, including Never Cry Wolf, Mishima, and Amadeus, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
Ms. Canavan produced Knee Deep with Producer/Director Michael Chandler. Ms. Canavan's other film work includes Yosemite, The Fate of Heaven and Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey. She is also a well-known consumer law attorney concentrating in predatory lending fraud and the financial abuse of the elderly. Ms. Canavan and Mr. Chandler are currently producing A Sense of Justice.
Blake Leyh is a Composer, Sound Designer, and Music Supervisor who lives in New York City. He has composed scores for more than a dozen feature films, including B-Movie schlock classics American Cyborg, the challenging independent drama Star Time, and award-winning documentary Twist Of Faith. In 1996 Leyh composed the score for the Sundance Jury Prize-winning documentary SICK: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, which marked the beginning of a long term collaboration with filmmaker Kirby Dick. In 2001, Blake became the music supervisor on HBO’s dramatic series The Wire and also composed the theme music for The Wire. www.blakeleyh.com
Knee Deep also features the work of renowned Maine fiddler and composer Greg Boardman. Greg’s exciting rendition of the film’s title sequence music, Jerusalem Breakdown, is from his Divine Waltz CD , available at http://www.bowandstring.com/shop.html.