Peter Landesman

Peter Landesman
Peter Landesman at the Deauville Film Festival
Nationality	American
Occupation	Film director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, novelist, painter
Known for	Concussion (feature film), The Girls Next Door (article)

Peter Landesman is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, novelist and painter. He wrote a number of cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and others, including investigations into global arms trafficking, sex trafficking, refugee trafficking, the Rwandan genocide, and the creation and smuggling of forged and stolen art and antiquities. He also reported from the conflicts in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Pakistan and Afghanistan post-9/11.

He wrote and directed his debut 2013 film Parkland and also a 2015 film, titled Concussion, produced by Ridley Scott and was released by Sony on Christmas Day, 2015.

Landesman wrote his first fiction book The Raven, which was published in 1995, for which he won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.

Landesman's article The Girls Next Door about sex slaves and the trafficking of young and often underage women into and through the United States, was featured as the cover story in the January 24, 2004 issue of New York Times Magazine.Daniel Radosh had a public dispute with Landesman, when Radosh challenged the facts of the article. A series of articles about the dispute by Jack Shafer in the magazine Slate turned the issue of the article's accuracy into one of the most controversial topics in journalism during the first half of 2004. The details of the expose were famously - almost obsessively - challenged, and, some say, ultimately verified and justified. That piece triggered a national conversation on sex trafficking in this country, and, notwithstanding the controversy over Landesman's accuracy, won Landesman his second Overseas Press Club Award, this one for Best Human Rights Reporting. The article was adapted into a film Trade deals with human trafficking out of Mexico and a brother's attempt to rescue his kidnapped and trafficked young sister. The film was released in 2007.

Landesman wrote and directed his debut historical film Parkland, based on the book Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by author Vincent Bugliosi. The film is about the chaotic events that occurred at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. James Badge Dale and Zac Efron starred in the film, which was released in 2013.