Alan Greenberg

Who is Alan Greenberg?

Alan Greenberg is an American film director, screenwriter, photographer and author.

Greenberg visited Jamaica from a young age, and was a friend of Bob Marley. Following Marley's death, Marley's family asked Greenberg to make a film about Marley. In 1981, Greenberg filmed Land of Look Behind, a documentary film that includes footage of Marley's funeral as well as scenes filmed in Jamaica's remote Cockpit Country and the capital city of Kingston. The film ended up being more of a visionary portrait of the Jamaica of that period than a film primarily about Marley. The film has won considerable critical acclaim, as well as winning the Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary in the Chicago International Film Festival, the U.S.'s largest film competition. Land of Look Behind has also been honored as the best American documentary film of its era, and the legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog says "'Land of Look Behind' has achieved things never seen before in cinema."

Greenberg has worked closely with Werner Herzog on many projects. He served as a special unit photographer on the films Cape Fear" by Martin Scorsese and 1900, by Bernardo Bertolucci. He has also written twenty screenplays and three books. His book Heart of Glass, about the making of the 1976 Werner Herzog masterwork of the same name, was called "The best book on the making of a film ever written" by Rolling Stone magazine. A new and entirely revised edition of the book, entitled, "EVERY NIGHT THE TREES DISAPPEAR: Werner Herzog and the Making of 'Heart of Glass'" has been published in hard cover by the Chicago Review Press. It features Greenberg's previously-unpublished photographs, which Herzog calls "strange and beautiful."