Ian Olds is an award-winning American film director. His directing credits include the documentary Occupation: Dreamland, which follows the 1/505 company of the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah, Iraq in early 2004, and the documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which depicts the working relationship between American journalist Christian Parenti and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi, who is later captured and murdered by the Taliban.Occupation: Dreamland won a 2006 Independent Spirit Award. Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi earned Olds the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and won Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 2009 Madrid International Documentary Film Festival. The film was nominated for a 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. HBO Documentaries acquired rights to the film.In 2012 Olds co-directed, along with American actor, director, producer, and author James Franco, the experimental narrative Francophrenia: (or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), which repurposes behind-the-scenes footage shot of Franco, while on set of General Hospital.Olds has also directed several short narrative films, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.In addition to collaborating on Francophrenia (or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), Olds edited Franco’s split-screen feature adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, which premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.Olds was awarded a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2011 San Francisco Film Society/Hearst Screenwriting Grant, and a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.Olds received his MFA from Columbia University’s Film Division in 2006. He was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2009 and was a 2011 Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab.
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