Tragic news today, as Oscar-nominated filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky, the co-director of the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, has died at the age of 58 after a battle with diabetes. Sinofsky and co-director Joe Berlinger first burst onto the scene with the wonderful 1992 doc Brother’s Keeper, which they independently financed in the days before indies were “in” and before digital made things easier. They followed that up with 1996’s seminal Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. That film began as a chronicle of three teenagers in West Memphis Arkansas who had presumably murdered three young boys as part of a Satanic ritual. As Sinofsky and Berlinger began to dive into the trial of the “West Memphis Three”, however, they soon realized something was off and the trio might actually be innocent.
After the first movie spurred interest in the case, Sinofsky and Berlinger made two more Paradise Lost films in an effort to raise awareness about the injustice, and the duo are responsible for the release of the West Memphis Three and, in the case of Damien Echols, they literally saved a man’s life.
Sinofsky was an incredible filmmaker who genuinely made a difference in this world, and for that he will be celebrated. Our thoughts are with his family and friends during this difficult time.
