Jesse Moss (filmmaker)

Jesse Moss is a Sundance Award-winning American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer known for his cinéma vérité style. His 2014 film, The Overnighters, was shortlisted for best documentary feature at the Oscars.

Moss has directed four independent, feature-length films and three television documentaries and has produced 15 documentaries.

Moss teaches filmmaking at San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area with his wife and frequent collaborator Amanda McBaine and their two children.

Moss was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. Though Moss never had any childhood aspirations toward filmmaking, his parents valued journalism. While he was growing up in his father’s house, a frequent guest was the renowned photojournalist Richard Boyle, who was famously depicted as a conflict-prone character dealing with substance abuse problems in Oliver Stone’s 1986 movie Salvador. Boyle came to stay in the Moss’ home and regaled the young Jesse Moss and his brother with stories of his adventures overseas. “In a way, that was inspiring,” Moss told David Poland in 2014.

Moss graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1993. He didn’t go to university intending to study film. He was interested in American history. Following graduation, he moved to Washington, D.C. where he worked with Congressman Vic Fazio for three years, eventually moving up the ranks to become a policy assistant and speechwriter.

Although he enjoyed his work in politics, he felt creatively frustrated. When he was 26, he met Christine Choy, a documentary filmmaker who was showing her film Who Killed Vincent Chin? He was struck that documentary film could be journalistic, political and artistic. He decided to try filmmaking. He quit his job, moved to New York in 1996 and began working for Christine Choy.

Later, he worked as an in-house producer at Cabin Creek Films for acclaimed documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple, who had made Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1990).

"Harlan County, USA is the high water mark of documentary filmmaking for me,” Moss told IndieWire. “It really takes us inside that extractive industry and finds the human heart of that experience.” The film won the 1977 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

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