Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris.—VNS Photo

HA NOI (VNS)– Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris will give a lecture on the craft to cinema students at the Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents in Ha Noi this Friday.

The lecture, which will start at 8.30am at 51 Tran Hung Dao Street, is part of a three-day master class on making documentaries.

After graduating from Harvard College, Harris started his professional career as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, covering crime.

Within a year he moved on to reporting national news for Associated Press and then to television, where he started making documentary films for the King Broadcasting Co. stations in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington.

Harris's award-winning early films document some of the most important and contentious political issues of the 60s. Huelga! is a portrait of Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers Union and the first year of the union's historic Delano grape strike.

The Redwoods presents the Sierra Club's successful case for establishing a Redwoods National Park. The Foreigners explores the work of a group of Peace Corps volunteers confronting the contradictions of US foreign policy as they try to bring about social change in Colombia.

In recent years Harris has focused on producing. He produced the award-winning Darfur Now and executive produced two other high profile documentary features, Spirit of the Marathon and Living in Emergency – stories of Doctors Without Borders.

Since 1983 he has taught filmmaking at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where he is a Distinguished Professor. From 1990-96 he was the chair of Film and TV Production.—VNS