Richard Trank, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who spent decades working at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, many of them running its in-house Moriah Films division, and who also oversaw the programming of media content for SWC’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and Jerusalem, has left the organization to launch his own production company, Sea Point Films and Media, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The new company, which will specialize in nonfiction but will also tackle narrative projects, already has three documentaries in the works — two in production, Always 28 and The Road Home (the latter with institutional backing from the Anti-Defamation League), and another in development, Toto & Coco. Toto & Coco is also simultaneously being developed as a narrative series.
Always 28 highlights the largely forgotten story of Nathan B. Baskind, a Jewish-American soldier who was wounded on D-Day, captured by the Nazis and died in their custody. The film follows a nonprofit organization seeking to locate his body and bring him home.
The Road Home chronicles the resilience of Israelis in the aftermath of the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest against Jews since the Holocaust, and features interviews with survivors and returned hostages, as well as their families and specialists who have helped them to reacclimate to society.
Toto & Coco, an adaptation of the bestselling 2020 book Toto & Coco: Spies, Seduction and the Fight for Survival, centers on Toto Koopman, a biracial and queer Vogue model and World War II spy for the British who was a close associate of French fashion designer and Nazi sympathizer Coco Chanel.
Trank, a native Angeleno who earned a B.A. at UC-Berkeley and did graduate work at USC, is best known for producing 1997’s The Long Way Home, a doc about Jewish refugees after the Holocaust, for which he was awarded the best documentary feature Oscar. His other credits include 1991’s Echoes That Remain, 1995’s Liberation, 2001’s In Search of Peace, 2004’s Unlikely Heroes, 2006’s Ever Again, 2007’s I Have Never Forgotten You, 2009’s Against the Tide (for which he was nominated for the best original screenplay Writers Guild Award), 2011’s Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny, 2012’s It Is No Dream, 2013’s The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, 2015’s The Prime Ministers: Soldiers & Peacemakers and Our Boy and 2018’s Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres.
In the course of his filmmaking, Trank has interviewed countless prominent people, among them Israeli prime ministers Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir, Yizhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu; American presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; and a wide variety of others, including Simon Wiesenthal, Barbra Streisand, Joseph Heller, Jane Fonda and Isaac Stern.
