Rob Gordon Bralver
Rob Gordon Bralver is an American filmmaker most widely known for directing and co-writing Moby Doc, along with editing Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia. His filmography has been showcased at major festivals including South by Southwest, Tribeca Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Stockholm International Film Festival, and Traverse City Film Festival among many others. Bralver's debut film as writer/director at age 22 was "Cure For Pain: The Mark Sandman Story" about the lead singer of cult band Morphine, produced by Jeff Broadway in 2011 more than a decade after Mark Sandman's untimely death on stage at a concert in Palestrina, Italy near Rome. The film was made in close collaboration with the surviving Sandman family and Mark's former bandmates Dana Colley and Billy Conway, chronicling Sandman's tragic family background and the deaths of both his brothers and the unlikely and extraordinary rise to cult stardom Sandman had as a unique and innovative instrumentalist. "Cure For Pain" won widespread acclaim and won multiple best film awards on the festival circuit worldwide including Doc NYC, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The noteworthy cast included Josh Homme, Ben Harper, Les Claypool, John Medeski, and Dicky Barrett. Success at festivals around the world led to the film being acquired for sales by The Gersh Agency and a distribution deal with Cinetic Media, attracting universally positive reviews and acclaim in publications such as Vanity Fair and BlackBook. Stereogum hailed the film as one of the 10 best rock documentaries of all time. Following the success of "Cure For Pain", Bralver again collaborated with producer Jeff Broadway on their second feature-length music documentary "Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records", which Broadway directed and Bralver co-wrote, produced, and edited. The film chronicled the legendary story of the notorious Los Angeles-based independent label Stones Throw Records, and the backstory of its founder DJ Peanut Butter Wolf. It premiered at the LA Film Festival in 2013 and was an instant success. The eclectic avant-garde cast of musicians launched by the label including Madlib, MF Doom, Mayer Hawthorne, Aloe Blacc, and a supporting ensemble of megastars such as Kanye West, Common, and Tyler the Creator drew global attention and overwhelmingly positive reviews. "Vinyl" sold out the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and was subsequently sold to Netflix and Red Bull Media House. The British Film Institute listed "Vinyl" as one of their top 10 landmark hip-hop documentaries ever made. Around the same time as production had begun on "Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton", Bralver was simultaneously brought on board a biographical documentary of a cultural icon and author Gore Vidal, produced by Vidal's nephew Burr Steers and directed by Nicholas Wrathall. Ultimately titled Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, the film had been being shot for several years when Bralver joined the filmmaking team and was instrumental in crafting thousands of hours of footage spanning Vidal's long and eventful life into a compelling account of Vidal's final reflective years, before his death in 2014. Featuring appearances by David Mamet, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tim Robbins, Sting, and a final poignant interview with the late Vidal protege Christopher Hitchens, the film was warmly received at a Tribeca premiere and went on to win the Audience Award and Best Documentary Film prizes at Michael Moore's Traverse City and the Palm Springs International Film Festival and sold to Netflix. Bralver spent two years back and forth between the production and post-production phases of "Vinyl" and "Vidal", working on both films simultaneously. Having made three widely respected feature-length biographical documentaries, Bralver turned his attention to music videos. Now 29, he was keen to work beyond the documentary format and was introduced to Moby by a mutual friend. Moby and Bralver developed a working friendship, sharing many of the same influences and inspirations, and Bralver produced and directed several music videos on the album Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt including This Wild Darkness and Like a Motherless Child, which were viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube and featured in Rolling Stone and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Having established a successful production style on the music videos together, Moby and Bralver began talks on a feature length documentary that would chronicle Moby's personal life, music career, and animal rights activism. They began production in 2018 and filmed and edited on a rolling basis for three years, before completing and releasing the film in 2021. Moby Doc featured special appearances from David Lynch and David Bowie, and was distributed in theaters and on digital platforms by Greenwich Entertainment. Owen Gleiberman at Variety reviewed the film as a "playful Dadaesque ramble", and RogerEbert praised its unique idiosyncratic style for "breathing thrilling new life into a safe and conventional genre." Bralver has cited the video work of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry as key influences on the film's style, along with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the surreal introspective manner in which they approach trapped, isolated characters internally evaluating and reminiscing over their lives.