Marylou & Jerome Bongiorno are
Emmy-nominated, award winning, husband-and-wife filmmakers who formed Bongiorno Productions.
Marylou, alumna/adjunct faculty of NYU’s Graduate Film School, is a producer, director, and screenwriter; Jerome is a DP, editor, animator, and screenwriter. The Bongiornos have created numerous fictional, documentary, art, and experimental films and screenplays with wide distribution for theaters, national PBS, foreign TV and museums. The duo earned numerous global awards, an Emmy nomination, and grants from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Martin Scorsese, Lew Wasserman, Warner Bros. Pictures, NEA, and NEH.
They created television programs for John Pierson’s “Split Screen,” which aired on Bravo and IFC and are currently on FilmStruck, a Special PBS program WORKING ACTORS (featuring Edie Falco, Matthew Broderick, Anthony LaPaglia, Audra McDonald) for the Emmy award-winning “City Arts,” and RUBOUT for Rainbow Media’s “Urban Indies.”
Their screenplay, LITTLE KINGS, is based on their New York Film Festival Grand Marnier Award winning short, won international writing prizes, and was produced with the $75,000 Richard Vague Film Production Fund Award and major support from SONY. LITTLE KINGS made its World Premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival, won the Festival Director’s Award for Best Feature at The Method Fest in LA, and garnered 4 top awards including Best Feature Film and Best Screenplay at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.
MOTHER-TONGUE: ITALIAN AMERICAN SONS & MOTHERS, featuring Martin Scorsese, John Turturro, and Rudy Giuliani, debuted on cable television, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and screened at the Venice Film Festival, Pesaro Film Festival, and numerous venues.
The first film in their 3Rs Trilogy of Urban America is the award winning, critically acclaimed documentary, REVOLUTION ’67, about civil uprising in Newark, NJ in 1967. Premiering nationally on the PBS series POV, STARZ, and currently on PBS’s America ReFramed, it is distributed by California Newsreel, and is screening internationally, funded in part by ITVS, POV/American Documentary, CPB, NJ Historical Commission and NEH. It’s the basis of a fictional film in development, Executive Produced by Spike Lee, received two national awards for outstanding film of American history, and features a curriculum designed by Teachers College, Columbia University.
The second film, THE RULE, on urban school reform, was released theatrically to critical acclaim, is broadcast nationally on PBS and foreign public TV, was screened by the White House at the U.S. Department of Education in 2016, led to a CBS “60 Minutes” segment, and has a free companion Curriculum Guide for High Schools.
The third film, RUST, recipient of several grants, is in production and tackles solutions to inner city poverty.
Upcoming WATERMARK is a fiction film set against the backdrop of post-Katrina New Orleans and the flooding in Venice, Italy. Featured at Sundance’s Investing in Media That Matters, Hamptons Writers Conference, IFP Market’s No Borders, and Tribeca Film Festival/Sloan Summit, it was the centerpiece of a Wingspread Conference funded by the Johnson Foundation, Park Foundation, Timberland, and major US environmental groups. A related series of films and photos is exhibited by PBS, fests, and museums.
The Bongiornos were two of “20 for 2000 - artists to watch this century,” as chosen by The Star-Ledger’s arts writers, “2 of 90 Interesting Members of Alpha Sigma Nu,” and are featured in Profiles of Italian Americans: Achieving the Dream and Giving Back. They have extensive teaching experience, are frequent lecturers on film, and received fellowships from NJSCA, MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Wildacres. Since 2013, they were recognized by: State of NJ, City of Newark, Alpha Sigma Nu, NJ Italian Heritage Commission, and St. Peter’s University (Urban Social Justice Award) for their outstanding contributions to cinema and public knowledge.
The Bongiornos’ TEDxNJIT talk in 2015: “Reduce Poverty in Inner Cities.”
Their NEW WORK city symphony films in 3D include: NEWARK - commissioned, acquired, and exhibited solo show in 2009-10 and 2016 by The Newark Museum and installed in a special gallery as the first art film at Newark Airport in ’13-14; THE BROOKLYN WATERFRONT presented at the Museum of the City of New York in 2010; and the NEA funded SI3D, commissioned by The Staten Island Museum for their new space in Snug Harbor and exhibited from ’15-17.
In release are: THE BLACK MONK, Chekhov-inspired fiction feature film; HEARING VOICES historical fiction short; ILLUMINATIONS, Rimbaud-inspired shorts; PAINTING RULES documentary on abstract painter Jerry Carniglia; and LOVE & ARGUMENTS, anthology of short fictional films inspired by classic literature.
In production: documentaries on eco-sustainable homes, activists, and artists; museum installations; and fiction films based on the 3Rs Trilogy, historical figures, and classic literature.
ABOUT BONGIORNO PRODUCTIONS