Kurt Kuenne

About Kurt Kuenne

Who is it?: Composer, Director, Editor
Birth Day: October 24, 1973
Occupation: Filmmaker, composer, writer
Notable work: Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

Kurt Kuenne Net Worth

Kurt Kuenne was born on October 24, 1973, is Composer, Director, Editor. Kurt Kuenne is an award-winning filmmaker and composer of both fiction and documentary films. He is a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing, and where he also studied film scoring at the USC School of Music under the tutelage of classic film composers Buddy Baker and David Raksin. His first feature, the teen drama "Scrapbook" (1999), landed him on Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Indie Film feature, and he followed it with "Drive-In Movie Memories" (2001), a documentary about outdoor movies which opened the 2001 Telluride Film Festival and played nationally on PBS.In 2002, he won the AMPAS Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his screenplay "Mason Mule", while his screenplay "Explode" made the quarterfinals in the same year. He then directed a series of black & white short musical comedies - "Rent-A-Person" (2004), "Validation" (2006), "Slow" (2007) and "The Phone Book" (2008) - which won 40+ awards at 120+ film festivals worldwide.In 2008, he completed his 6 year passion project, the documentary "Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father", which premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. The film was released by Oscilloscope Laboratories and MSNBC Films, was named one of the Top 5 Documentaries of 2008 by the National Board of Review, won numerous awards and placed on more than 40 critics' lists of the Ten Best Films of 2008. "Dear Zachary" inspired the creation of Bill C-464 in Canadian Parliament, which reformed Canada's criminal code when it became law on December 15, 2010. (An epilogue chronicling this process - "The Legacy of Dear Zachary: A Journey to Change Law" - was released on the web in 2013.) In 2011, he collaborated for the second time with actor TJ Thyne ("Validation", "Bones") on the fiction feature "Shuffle", a mystery/fantasy about a man who begins experiencing his life out of order, which was released by Screen Media Films and won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, including the 2013 Frank Capra Award.His work as composer includes re-scoring the restoration of the silent classic "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1925) and writing the book, music and lyrics for the stage musical adaptation of Frank Beddor's New York Times-bestselling novel "The Looking Glass Wars".
Kurt Kuenne is a member of Composer

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1973

Kuenne was born October 24, 1973 in Mountain View, California He grew up in Northern California, and began making films aged seven on Super 8 film and later video. He studied film at University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, where he made Remembrances (1995) and was awarded the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing. Kuenne then studied film composing, but returned to directing with feature Scrapbook (1999). In 2002 he was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for a script titled Mason Mule.

2007

Validation (2007), written, directed, and scored by Kuenne, was distributed through Gay Hendricks's Spiritual Cinema Circle and is a short film about a parking attendant (played by T. J. Thyne) who dispenses compliments to his customers. It won Best Short Grand Prize at the 2007 Heartland Film Festival, and The Independent Critic rated it A+. It has received more than 9 million YouTube views.

2008

Kuenne's documentary Dear Zachary (2008), about the murder of his childhood friend Andrew Bagby, was received as a documentary that "will rip you apart inside and pour your guts out through your tear ducts".

2011

His latest feature film Shuffle (2011) again stars T. J. Thyne, playing a man who finds his life running out of sequence. It won the Jury Award for Best Feature at the 17th Stony Brook Film Festival.