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Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (born December 12, 1968) is an American documentary filmmaker. Kennedy has made documentary films that center on social issues such as addiction, her opposition to nuclear power, the treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the politics of the Mexican border fence. She is the youngest child of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Early life and education Rory Kennedy was born on December 12, 1968, in Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., to parents Robert F. Kennedy, a former United States Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and 1968 U.S. presidential candidate, and his wife Ethel Kennedy. She was born six months after her father was assassinated. Her mother chose her name "Rory" after the last high king of Ireland, Rory O'Connor, who ruled in the 12th century. On December 19, 1968, a week after Rory was born, her mother took her to her father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's older brother Michael LeMoyne Kennedy was assigned as her godparent by their mother. In December 1997, she tried to resuscitate her brother Michael after a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, which was fatal. Friends of the Kennedy family said Rory and Michael spoke almost every day of their lives. When Rory was a teenager, she was arrested during a protest outside the South African Embassy. When she was 15, her 28-year-old brother David died from a drug overdose. Rory graduated from Madeira School in McLean, Virginia, and then Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her sophomore year at Brown, Rory organized a rally in front of a Providence supermarket. In solidarity with migrant farm workers, she urged shoppers to boycott grapes. Career In the 1990s, Kennedy and fellow Brown classmate Vanessa Vadim (daughter of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda) formed May Day Media, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that specializes in the production and distribution of films with a social conscience. Women of Substance was Kennedy's first documentary. The film was released in 1994, and the idea came out of a paper about female addicts that she wrote while a student at Brown. In 1998, Kennedy and another fellow Brown graduate Liz Garbus founded Moxie Firecracker Films, which specializes in documentaries that highlight pressing social issues. The television networks that have shown its films include: A&E, the UK's Channel 4, Court TV, Discovery Channel, HBO, Lifetime, MTV, Oxygen, PBS, Sundance Channel, and TLC. She directed and co-produced American Hollow (1999), a film about a struggling Appalachian family that received critical acclaim and many awards. HBO broadcast the film and publisher Little, Brown and Company simultaneously released Kennedy's companion book. Kennedy presented the documentary at Wittenberg University on September 13, 2001. In October 2001, Kennedy traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to address the opening meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women. At the meeting, she spoke about her documentary film-production company Change the World Through Film. Kennedy directed and co-produced the Emmy Award-nominated series Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2003), which premiered at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on July 8, 2002. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and tells the stories of AIDS patients outside the Western world. It was broadcast in America as a five-part series on HBO in June 2003. Kennedy directed and co-produced A Boy's Life (2004), the story of a young boy and his family in rural Mississippi. The movie premiered at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Woodstock Film Festival; it was later broadcast on HBO. When Kennedy was asked in a March 24, 2004, interview with Salon about her interest in the American South, she cited her father's experiences in the region as an inspiration and starting point. In the same article, she goes on to mention that showing class differences in American culture also motivates her. She directed and co-produced Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable (2004) for HBO, which was broadcast on September 9, 2004. The film takes a "what if" look at the catastrophic consequences of a radioactive release at the Indian Point Energy Center, a three-unit nuclear-power plant station, located 35 miles (56 km) north of midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York. Kennedy directed and co-produced Homestead Strike (2006) as part of The History Channel's series, 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America (April 2006). She was a co-executive producer for Street Fight (2005), which chronicles the 2002 Newark, New Jersey, unsuccessful mayoral campaign of Democratic Cory Booker — then a Newark Municipal Councilman — against Democratic eighteen-year incumbent Mayor Sharpe James. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary (Feature). (Booker later won the mayoral election on May 9, 2006, against Democratic Ronald Rice; James did not seek re-election for another four-year term in 2006.) Kennedy directed and co-produced Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Best Documentary. Kennedy first learned of the Abu Ghraib prison practices when images came out in the media, which were accompanied by a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. According to Kennedy, she was "horrified and shocked and disgusted" by the images of the naked prisoners and laughing American soldiers. She conducted interviews with people who were present at the prison along with those directly involved in the abuse. Kennedy's opinion of the participants changed after she interviewed them, when she began feeling they "were very humane and very much like me" and discovered they "were not monsters." She directed Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House for HBO Documentary Films, which premiered on HBO on August 18, 2008. According to reviews, the 40-minute-long documentary provided an interesting, though brief, glimpse into the iconic journalist. On June 30, 2009, Kennedy was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kennedy directed The Fence (La Barda), which premiered at the opening night of The Sundance Film Festival 2010. The film made its debut on HBO on September 16, 2010. Favorably received, it details the woeful inadequacies of the border fence between the United States and Mexico, which has increased migrants' deaths, but does not deter illegal immigration. In 2011, she produced and directed Ethel, which was a documentary about her mother. The movie premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO on October 18, 2012. Reviews portrayed the documentary as a moving tribute, but criticized its lack of depth. Kennedy conducted interviews with her siblings over five days at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port. For the finished film, she went through "some 100 hours" of archive .... Discover the Rory Richards popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Rory Richards books.