2005 CIDF Genius Career Achievement Award

Michael Rabiger

for his more than 30 years of teaching and inspiring young filmmakers as well as promoting the genre of documentary film through his films and publications

Following in the path of his makeup artist father, Michael Rabiger went into the British film industry in 1956. At age of 17 he became an assistant film editor and went on to work on twelve feature films at Pinewood and Shepperton Studios. Rabiger shifted to television documentary in 1962 and edited roughly thirty films for BBC, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Granada Television, among others. From 1967-1972, he directed twenty-one documentaries in six countries for BBC, and helped establish an oral history series.

Later in 1972, Rabiger journeyed to the US to teach at Columbia College Chicago (CCC) in what was then a commencing film department of just sixty students. He wrote reviews and criticism for the New Art Examiner, and in late 1980s published the first editions of DIRECTING THE DOCUMENTARY and DIRECTING: FILM TECHNIQUES AND AESTHETICS (both Focal Press, Boston). In 1988 he founded the Documentary Center at CCC before designing and leading the first VISIONS European documentary workshop for GEECT/CILECT, which met in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam, in 1994. During 1994-95 he was the distinguished visiting professor at New York University's Department of Film and Television, and in 1996 he returned to Chicago to publish DEVELOPING STORY IDEAS (Focal Press, Boston). Plus, in 1996 he became Chair of CCC’s Film/Video Department, which now enlists more than 1,900 students. In 2001, Rabiger retired from teaching to write full-time and in that same year, the CCC’s Film/Video Department's documentary center was renamed "The Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary."

To add to his list of accomplishments, Michael Rabiger was awarded the International Documentary Association’s Preservation and Scholarship Award in 2003. His directing books (now in fourth editions) are translated into Spanish, German, Chinese, and Korean, with other interpretations on the way. Rabiger has given lectures and workshops in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. He has also published articles and essays about the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, and has been working for many years on a biography. He is currently writing the libretto for an opera adaptation of Hardy's striking novel ”The Mayor of Casterbridge”.