Jay Gira

Jay Gira was born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan and became inspired to pursue the art of filmmaking while documenting a personal journey down in Boliva shortly after high school. Upon returning back to the states he enrolled in the prestigious University of Michigan - Ann Arbor where he studied cinema and mentored under Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill) and Bruce Joel Rubin (Jacobs Ladder). His thesis film, a Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, won best picture at the university and went on to win several festival awards at the student level. After graduation he was immediately recruited by a young new media production company called Zoom Culture and relocated to the research triangle of North Carolina. After raising several million dollars in seed money the company fully launched and Gira was transferred to Hollywood, California to head productions for the west coast office. Within three months he helped Zoom Culture partner with the Los Angeles film school and worked along side Tom Mount (head of RKO Studios) and Kevin Foxe (Blair Witch) developing new media projects for television and the web. Out of the LA office one project titled "Hip Hop Nation" was eventually picked up and aired on NBC nationally in over 150 markets around the country. After the dot.com 1.0 bubble burst, Gira decided to leave Zoom Culture in order to strengthen his craft in filmmaking by 1st Assistant Directing nine feature films of various genres. Several of the films have went on to gain world wide theatrical distribution (20th Century Fox) and open high profile film festivals (Tribeca, Berlin). Jay Gira then began a career in feature film directing and his debut film is a documentary on high profile celebrity court cases. Gira uses the historic OJ Simpson trial as a case study for his film and was granted unprecedented access to the defamed football star by filming over 10 hours of footage of Mr. Simpson when he agreed to let him photograph him his as he returned to L.A.. Simpson re-traced all the steps of the historical events that lead to "The trial of the Century" for Gira. The locations included trips to the courthouse, USC campus, Bundy st. and the epic freeway chase. Gira also interviewed the prosecution team (Marsha Clark) and the Defense (The Cochran firm, F. Lee Baily) and a never before interview with OJ's eldest daughter, Arnell Simpson. Shortly after wrapping the film O.J. Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas and some of Gira's footage was featured on "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider" for a 6 figure deal, which also included an interview with Gira and was viewed by over 10 million people globally. After three days of the shows airing, famous Harvard Law professor Alan Durchawitz invited Gira to the Cambridge campus in Boston for a rare interview on Durchawitz on his involvement in the trial filmed in his Harvard Law office. The film has currently been picked up by Distribution company Celebrity video and will be their "Tent Pole" release in time for the 2010 holiday season. Gira's latest film was shot in the fall of 2009 and is titled "Affairs Across America", which he spent 30 days driving from LA to NYC interviewing individuals from every state along the way on the current state of marriage and doing an extensive PR campaign promoting the film along the way. While the film was being edited the Tiger Woods scandal and Sandra Bullock/Jesse James infidelity news broke. The film currently slated for the Toronto film festival in 2010 and is expected for a phenomenal success. Gira's third film is being adapted from a book called "6 people you meet in Hell" and is about the people who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina and their experiences. Production is expected to start in the winter of 2011.