Diane Weyermann Passed Away Yesterday

So sad news. Only 66 years old. Lucky us who met Diane and learned from her generosity, passion and knowledge. Always with a smile. My wife and I visited her briefly in Venice CA, had brunch in the sunshine and saw her beautiful house. And talked about ”her” times in Europe working for George (Soros) as she put it. Staying with this flashback, in 2012 I wrote the following on this blog:

Hot Docs gives a Doc Mogul Award every year and there shall be no objection, not at all, on the contrary, to the choice of recipient this year. For this blogger, when he was at EDN (European Documentary Network), Diane Weyermann was a key person for the development of the documentary scene in a new and free Eastern Europe way back in the middle of the 1990’s. She came to many of the EDN workshops in the region and she was precise, warm and generous in her support to documentary films, when she launched the Soros Documentary Fund in 1996. Personally I remember having made an interview for DOX with Diane in New York and met a committed and modest person with a big love to the creative documentary. And a woman with a working and walking pace (down the streets of Manhattan) that was quite different from the Nordic tradition! She managed to transform the Soros Documentary Fund into the Sundance Documentary Fund before she went to (taken from the HotDocs site) “Participant Media, where she has overseen such documentary projects as the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning FOOD INC., WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN”, STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS, DARFUR NOW, and the Academy Award-winning AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.” In the funds and in the company, Weyermann has been involved with the production of over 300 documentary films from around the world. The most well deserved documentary recognition I could think of.

RIP.