CURRENT PROJECTS
It Happened Here: Warnings to the West from Dorothy Thompson & Sinclair Lewis
Producer
Currently In Production
Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can't Happen Here in 1935 at his summer home in Barnard, Vermont. The novel depicted a fascist takeover of the United States in the midst of the Great Depression and one reporter's efforts to resist.
The year before writing this story, Lewis's wife, Dorothy Thompson, was expelled from Germany by Adolph Hitler after meeting with the "the very prototype of the Little Man" and relentlessly exposing his authoritarian ambitions. Thompson was widely regarded as the 'First Lady' of American journalism. It Happened Here is a new documentary film about how these two icons of the 20th century raised the alarm when threats to a free press and civilized society appeared abroad and at home.
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
Search Engine Breakdown
Associate Producer
2021
Search Engine Breakdown, an installment of the long running science program NOVA on PBS, explores the hidden biases in search engine technology and how technology can be made more equitable.
Miracle on 42nd Street
2017
Archival Producer
The story of Manhattan Plaza, the renowned experiment in subsidized housing catering to people in the arts. Numerous celebrities pay homage to the impact the building had on their lives and careers.
Two Trains Runnin'
Grammy-nominated for Best Music Documentary in 2018
Archival Producer
2017
Two Trains Runnin' is about the search for two forgotten blues singers, carried out in Mississippi during the height of the American civil rights movement.
Wilhemina's War
2016
Associate Producer
2017 Emmy-nominated for News and Doc Emmy
The story of a grandmother who tries to help her family through HIV in the rural south, where living with AIDS is a grim reality.
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People
2014
Associate Producer
Sundance Film Festival Premiere 2014
2015 Emmy-nominated for News and Documentary
This film explores how African American communities have used the camera as a tool for social change from the invention of photography to the present. This epic tale poetically moves between the present and the past, through contemporary photographers and artists whose images and stories seek to reconcile legacies of pride and shame while giving voice to images long suppressed, forgotten, and hidden from sight.
BIO
Sheila Maniar was recently the Filmed Sequences AP for the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, Co-Producer for Red Bull Music Academy’s Disco Demolition; AP for the Emmy-nominated Wilhemina's War, Coordinating Producer for PBS’ Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock, and US Production Manager for One Thousand Pictures, which was short-listed for Oscar consideration.
Her extensive archival experience includes the Oscar-winning Citizenfour, Jonathan Demme’s Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about President Mandela of South Africa, the Grammy-nominated Two Trains Runnin', and the Tony-nominated Evita.