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Walk With Me
Director and Producer Heidi Levitt, Producer Vanessa Perez, Executive Producers David Guy Elisco and Alex Gibney
Logline
Told from the intimate points of view of both the filmmaker and her husband, who was diagnosed at 57 with Early-Onset Alzheimer’s, Walk With Me grapples with how to reframe a marriage–and how to live–in the face of a disease that has no treatment or cure.
Heidi Levitt - Director and Producer
Heidi is a first-time documentary film director, with a long history in the industry and has won four Artios Awards for her work casting feature films and theater productions. She has cast a broad array of films from the Academy Award-winning Best Picture, The Artist directed by Michel Hazanavicius, to films for directors including: Oliver Stone, Wayne Wang, Sally Potter, Wim Wenders, Diego Luna, Mark Ruffalo,Victor Nunez, and Mark Pellington. Other notable films she has cast include JFK, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, The Rock, and The Joy Luck Club. In addition to casting, she has also collaborated with these directors as a producer. And she is grateful for their support on Walk With Me. In 2021, she produced and cast Victor Nunez’s latest film Rachel Hendrix which just premiered at the 2023 Santa Barbara International Film festival, and in 2019 she executive produced and cast Wayne Wang’s film Coming Home Again, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released by Outsider Pictures. She cast and co-produced Sally Potter’s film, The Roads Not Taken, a story about a man living with dementia, currently playing on Hulu. The film stars Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Laura Linney, and Salma Hayek. Heidi is a member of AMPAS and The Casting Society of America. She is a graduate of Barnard College and the American Film Institute, where she is a senior lecturer, and in fall 2023, she will also be teaching in the cinema studies department at the University of Vermont.
Vanessa Perez - Producer
Perez began her career in Talent Management at ICM. After leaving ICM, her goal was to create multicultural content that resonates globally. She began working for the production company, CANANA Films, which was led by Pablo Cruz, Diego Luna, and Gael Garcia Bernal, where she was the executive in charge of production for the company’s slate. As an independent producer, Perez’s projects have been supported by TIFF, SFFILM, WIF, SUNDANCE, AND FILM INDEPENDENT. As a Latinx creator, Perez continues to foster and support young filmmakers through her work as a thesis mentor at AFI and through her work at the Executive Producer of the GuadaLAjara Film Festival in Los Angeles.
David Guy Elisco - Executive Producer
David Guy Elisco manages the development and production of a portfolio of films for HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, focusing on feature-length documentaries. In his work, he is drawn to dramatic stories that touch the heart, inspire wonder, and provide insight into life on Earth. Most recently, Elisco served as executive producer on the Oscar-nominated All That Breathes, the most awarded documentary of 2022, picking up the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the L’Oeil d’Or Award for Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival among its honors.
Alex Gibney - Executive Producer
Director Alex Gibney, called “the most important documentarian of our time” by Esquire Magazine, has a signature cinematic style. His work has received an Academy Award, multiple Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, several Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia Award, The Independent Spirit Award, and The Writers Guild Award. In 2013, Alex was honored with the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) Career Achievement Award. In 2015, he received the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Prize; and in 2019, he received the Robert J. Flaherty Award. Some of Gibney’s notable films include the triple Emmy and Peabody award-winning Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, the most-watched non-music HBO documentary; the Academy Award winning Taxi to The Dark Side; the Oscar nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; the Emmy Award winning Mea Maxima Culpa; as well as The Armstrong Lie; We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks; and the Peabody Award winning Zero Days. No Stone Unturned was nominated for the WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary. His film The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley won the WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. His most recent films include Citizen K, Crazy Not Insane, Agents of Chaos, and Totally Under Control–a searing look at the Trump administration’s inability to contain COVID-19 released in October.
Project logline and bios courtesy of the grantees.