Metropole Film Board is a not-for-profit corporation that serves as a fiscal agent for special
documentary projects by Storyville Films and other production companies. It was originally established
by Alberta & Irving Jacoby, in 1950, as the Mental Health Film Board, to produce educational films in
the areas of psychiatry (The Lonely Night), child development (Angry Boy), social work (The Neglected),
aging (The Steps of Age), and race (Hitch). Over the next four decades, the Film Board went on to make
over a hundred ground-breaking films on these subjects, working with America’s pioneer documentary
filmmakers, including Williard Van Dyke: The River (1937), The City (1939), John Ferno: The Spanish Earth
(1937), Shirley Clarke (Skyscraper), and Jacoby himself, High Over the Borders (1942) and The Photographer
(1948). A number of their films are available for viewing as part of the permanent film collection of The
Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The film board was re-established in 1996 and re-named Metropole, to conduct a broader program for
the planning, fund-raising and production of documentary films not likely to be funded or distributed
through commercial channels. Recent films developed by Metropole include: The McCarthy Project, a portrait
of the politician and poet Eugene McCarthy and Libraries on Fire, a documentary about the living national
treasures of Indonesia.
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