Overview
Paul Saltzman (born 1943) is a Canadian film and television producer and director. A two-time Emmy Award-recipient, he has been credited on more than 300 films, both dramas and documentaries.
The 2008 documentary feature, Prom Night in Mississippi, featuring actor Morgan Freeman, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. His feature documentary, The Last White Knight—Is Reconciliation Possible? premiered at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) in 2012. It features Morgan Freeman, Harry Belafonte, Delay de la Beckwith (son of Byron De La Beckwith) as well as Saltzman himself. His most recent film is the feature documentary Meeting the Beatles in India filmed in India, Canada, USA and England is his most personal film tracing his life-changing journey to India, learning meditation and spending a week with the Beatles at an ashram in Rishikesh. He is also founder, CEO and president of the charitable, non-profit organization Moving Beyond Prejudice, which works with police forces, students, educators, youth-at-risk and community groups.
Early life
He was born in 1943 the son of Percy Saltzman, Canada's first English-speaking TV weatherman, and Rose Cohen. After briefly studying mathematics and science, he did congressional civil rights lobbying in Washington, D.C., and in the summer of 1965 he did voter registration work in Mississippi as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would later lead him to go back to the area to explore the concept of prejudice and racism with his first documentary feature film, Prom Night in Mississippi. He lives in the Toronto area, and has one daughter, Devyani Saltzman, a writer and literary curator, with his ex-wife, director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta. His partner is Anne Peace, a writer and joyologist.
The Beatles
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).