Paul Wagner, Charlottesville’s first and only Emmy- and Oscar-winning documentary film director, still gives serious meaning to the self-styled guerrilla filmmaker. In 1996, he led a small film crew into Tibet and secretly filmed scenes with a digital video camera in order to produce Windhorse, a gritty and evocative film about the horrors Tibetans still face today.

Angels, his first feature film shot in and around Charlottesville and featuring many local talents, previewed to great acclaim at the 2004 Virginia Film Festival.

The Stone Carvers, his 1984 portrait of the Italian American artisans who carved the gargoyles and statues of the Washington Cathedral, received both Emmy and Oscar awards; in 1998, he earned another Emmy for A Paralyzing Fear: the Story of Polio in America, a documentary he produced about America’s scientific and cultural conquest of polio; and Out of Ireland earned a Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize in 1995.

Since the 1980s, Wagner has directed documentary films for the Smithsonian Institution about old-time medicine shows, museum education, family traditions, fishmongers, Southern pottery, the U.S. Postal Service, the Columbian Quincentenary, and anthropological rituals around the world. He served as executive producer for films on the history of insane asylums and on the French novelist Marcel Proust, both broadcast nationally on PBS. He has co-authored two books, both companion volumes to his documentary films, Out of Ireland and A Paralyzing Fear: the Triumph Over Polio in America.

Paul Wagner has been awarded many grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the D.C. Humanities Council, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and from the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic Media Fellowship Programs. In addition to the Oscar and the Emmy, his films have won many regional Emmy Awards, CINE Golden Eagles, the Irish Silver Harp Award, Blue and Red Ribbons from the American Film Festival and the Grand Prize from the National Educational Film Festival.

The 2006 Virginia Film Festival is honored to welcome back Paul Wagner and to premier The God of a Second Chance, his latest feature documentary about religion, race, poverty, drugs and sensuality in an inner city neighborhood of Washington DC.