Ilie Mitaru is an Emmy-nominated producer and director whose work centers on regular people in extraordinary circumstances.
American cowboys brought to rural Russia to help restart the country’s beef industry; renegade farmers building their own wildfire defense rigs; a lone auto mechanic traversing miles of desert borderland with jugs of water to save his fellow migrants, Ilie’s stories create empathy and a connection to what at first might appear foreign, but ultimately proves universal.
Ilie’s films and photography have been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian, among others. A first generation Romanian-American whose parents received political asylum during the Cold War, Ilie is drawn to stories that push against easy assumptions of otherness and strive for a more complex understanding of the individuals and communities centered in his work.
He can be reached at mitaru23 [at] gmail [dot com]