ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
A feature-length documentary film that explores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the ground-breaking impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, which tells the story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust and his own struggle to come to terms with this legacy.

SYNOPSIS
While best known for the two volumes of Maus (voted by the New York Public Library as one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years), Spiegelman’s deeply personal body of work also includes In the Shadow of No Towers, Breakdowns, and The Wild Party. He is known for his many provocative covers for The New Yorker magazine, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. With his wife, Françoise Mouly, Spiegelman published and edited the acclaimed and influential comics magazine RAW from 1980-1991, where Maus was first serialized.

When Maus was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, Art, a self-avowed “first amendment fundamentalist,” stepped back into the spotlight as an ardent defender of free speech and against book-banning in both national media appearances and community engagements all over the country. As one of our country’s leading public intellectuals, he has used his platform well and continues to do so.

ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE! is a portrait of an artist fully engaged with his past and his present who, with his chosen medium of comics, helps us to understand our turbulent world. It is testimony to the power of art to make sense of our personal and collective histories.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Molly Bernstein, Philip Dolin
PRODUCER Alicia Sams, Molly Bernstein, Philip Dolin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Lauren Lexton

WEBSITE artspiegelmandoc.com