Biography
David Leitner is a producer, cinematographer, and director of photography working in television, feature-length documentaries, and feature films. Formerly serving as Director of Photography for I.A.T.S.E. 644, Leitner has shot films for documentary directors such as Fred Wiseman, Allan Miller, Alan Berliner, Joe Berlinger, DeWitt Sage, Oren Rudavsky, Doug Block, Judith Helfand, and the team of Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker, and Paul Stekler. He has significant credits on over forty feature-length documentaries filmed across the UK, South and Central America, East and West Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Notably, he directed, produced, and photographed Vienna Is Different, which was featured at the 1989 Berlin Film Festival, the 1990 Sundance competition, and the 1990 San Francisco Film Festival, where it received a Special Jury Award.
As co-producer, his 1990 Oscar-nominated film For All Mankind also won the 1989 Sundance Jury and Audience Awards for Best Documentary. He served as associate producer on The Gate Of Heavenly Peace, showcased at the 1995 New York Film Festival and the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. Leitner earned a 1999 Emmy nomination for cinematography on Marion Cajori’s Portrait-In-Progress: Chuck Close. His cinematography credits include PBS/Frontline’s Schizophrenia: Broken Mind (broadcast nationally four times in 1990), Alan Berliner's Nobody's Business (1996 New York Film Festival, 1997 Berlin Film Festival), and Christian Baudissin's Die Slocum Brennt! (aired in Germany in 1999).
His dramatic feature work includes Gabriela Rangel’s Corazones Negros (Venezuela, 1994), Diane Orr’s hybrid documentary/drama Lost Forever With Everett Ruess (2000), which he also produced, and Trembling Before G-d (2001). During the 1980s as Director of New Technology at Du Art Film Laboratory, he developed innovations in 16mm-to-35mm blow-ups, film camera lens testing, film timecode, and film-to-tape transfers.
Leitner has authored over 100 articles on film history, theory, and technology in publications including Filmmaker, Millimeter, The Independent (where he created the "In Focus" column from 1981 to 1988), International Documentary, In Motion, Variety’s On Production, Digital Magic, RES, and the SMPTE Journal. He also wrote Eastman Kodak’s booklet Creating Better Video with 16mm Film (1992).
More recently, Leitner directed his first dramatic feature, My Sister’s Wedding (2001), a romantic comedy shot in high-definition digital video and transferred to 35mm. As a producer, his credits include The Technical Writer (2003), Swimmers (2005), and Memories of Overdevelopment (2010), a follow-up to the iconic Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), both adapted from novels by Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes.
