Still Rolling: Marc Levin’s Enduring Documentary Vision

By Michael Jacobsohn

The making of independent documentaries is in flux: on the one hand, the public continues to have a large appetite for documentary film content; on the other hand, funding and exhibition venues have diminished.

To get a perspective on the state of the independent documentary world, I had an extensive conversation with Marc Levin, who has successfully run Blowback Productions on West 26th Street since 1988.

This month, two of Blowback’s documentaries are coming to fruition. Daughters of 9/11, a CBS special program pays homage to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and Workers of Art focuses on the important role art plays in our society.

Levin was drawn to Daughters of 9/11 because he believes an important part of the 9/11 story remains unfinished. Twenty-five years later, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, has still not gone to trial. Levin wants viewers to understand that the story did not end with the death of Osama bin Laden.

The documentary finds its emotional center in Elizabeth Miller and Jessica Trant, two women who lost their fathers on 9/11. Though united by grief and a desire for justice, they disagree profoundly about what that justice should be. Miller opposes the death penalty, while Trant believes Mohammed should be executed. Their friendship allows Levin to put deeply human faces on questions of loss, anger, forgiveness, and justice.

A third important figure is former FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino, who began tracking Mohammed after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and pursued him for years. After Mohammed was transferred to Guantanamo, Pellegrino finally sat face-to-face with him during four days of FBI interviews.

By bringing these three stories together, Levin transforms a complicated legal and political history into a human drama. The daughters represent those still living with the consequences of 9/11, while Pellegrino represents the decades-long pursuit of accountability. Levin’s central message is simple but urgent: the 9/11 case is not over, and America still deserves a full reckoning with what happened.

Workers of Art is a full-length documentary about what happens when society decides that artists and their work have value. The film is a partnership between Blowback Productions and Creative Rebuild New York (CRNY). CRNY was a three-year, $125 million initiative that provided guaranteed income and employment opportunities to 2,700 artists across New York State. CRNY believed that artists are workers who deserve equitable, sustainable support structures, and that improving the lives of artists is paramount to the vitality of New York State’s collective social and economic well-being.

Levin shares that the film grew out of his own experience with CETA, a federal jobs program that changed his life and helped launch his career. What interested him was not simply the money but the human impact: how supporting artists can change lives and strengthen communities. The challenge, he says, was to take thousands of stories from across New York and make that idea personal, human, and accessible.

I first met Levin in 1978. We were two unemployed New York City filmmakers who were accepted into the CETA artist work program, a throwback to the WPA of the 1930s. For two years, we earned a living as we raced around the city offering our free services to communities that needed media assistance.

Levin traces his documentary career back to the CETA arts program, where he began editing on early three-quarter-inch video equipment and soon created a small studio in his loft. That independent operation evolved into Blowback Productions, a family-style company built around long-term collaborators, including his father and producer Daphne Pinkerson. He describes Pinkerson as the organizational backbone of Blowback Productions. While he sees himself as a free spirit, Pinkerson manages budgets, planning, administration, delegation, and the countless details behind the camera. Her persistence, loyalty, and decades-long partnership provide the structure that allows Levin’s creative instincts to flourish.

Levin says the company’s name came from his work with Bill Moyers on The Secret Government and the idea of “blowback” is the unintended consequences of political actions. His subjects often emerge organically through relationships, curiosity, and immersion. Rather than beginning with a fully scripted outcome, he looks for rich worlds, strong characters, and stories whose direction may still be unknown.

Sustaining that independence, however, requires constant juggling. Levin may pursue three, four, or five projects at once, knowing only some will be funded, while maintaining relationships with networks, producers, and other industry partners. HBO, and particularly his relationship with Sheila Nevins, became an important lifeline that helped Blowback survive changes in technology and the documentary marketplace.

Levin acknowledges that documentaries can now provide a career, but warns that success has also brought formulas, tighter schedules, and pressure to know the ending before filming begins. His advice to young filmmakers is practical: develop a marketable skill like editing or shooting that can pay the bills, while also building a “tribe” of creative collaborators. Make work together, share it wherever audiences can find it, and keep one foot in earning a living and the other in personal storytelling. Independence, for Levin, depends on craft and community.

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Daughters of 9/11 airs on CBS on September 11 at 9 p.m. and will stream on Paramount+ afterward.

To find out more about Workers of Art go to the film’s website:  https://www.workersofartfilm.com/

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Michael Jacobsohn is an independent New York City filmmaker. Last year he completed The Cornelia Street Café in Exile, a full-length documentary on the greatly missed Cornelia Street Café. He curates and hosts a bimonthly screening of short films by New York metropolitan filmmakers at New Plaza Cinema. In mid-November, he will curate and host a selection of short AI films for the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival (VAEFF), screening at downtown’s Cinema Village.