Micha X. Peled (United States)

Micha Peled was born and raised in Israel and is one of the few people ever to emigrate to the United States by hitchhiking. His checkered career includes stints as an importer of hammocks and sheepskin jackets, a tutor, a prison guard, a freelance journalist, a director of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign and the executive director of Media Alliance, a media watchdog group in San Francisco. He also guided adventure trips in the jungles of Thailand and Brazil. Peled’s first documentary, Will My Mother Go Back to Berlin? looked at relations between Jews and Germans 50 years after the Holocaust through his personal family story. Winning awards on both sides of the Atlantic, Peled left his job to become a full-time filmmaker. His next film, Inside God's Bunker, followed a group of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank during a highly tense period that culminated in a massacre. It aired on television in Europe, Australia, the United States and Japan. Micha Peled believes globalization is the main theme of our times, and he is currently working on the third in a trilogy on this topic. The first, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, was awarded the Golden Gate Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival. The second, China Blue, premiered at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival, won the Amnesty Human rights award at IDFA and the PBS/Independent Lens Audience Award. The third part of the filmmaker's "globalization trilogy", documentary Bitter Seeds examines the astonishing suicide rate among farmers in central India. Micha’s films won two Hugo awards and two Cine Golden Eagle awards. All of his films have aired on U.S. television. They have been exhibited in numerous film festivals around the world, including Berlin, Toronto, Amsterdam (IDFA), Hong Kong, Rotterdam etc. Along the way, Peled has produced numerous television magazine items for broadcasters in the U.S. (CNBC), Germany (ARD, the first channel) and France (FR 2), as well as a few independent video shorts. He also authored a slim volume of fiction, The Fisherman and the Nymph.