Daniel Kraus ‎(Cinema Purgatorio‎)

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Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus is director of the acclaimed WORK series, which so far includes the movies Sheriff, Musician, and the forthcoming Professor and Preacher.

Kraus describes the series as follows:

The WORK series is a cycle of independent films that seek to create an ongoing document of the American worker. Taking inspiration from Studs Terkel and Frederick Wiseman, the WORK films are entertaining and empowering, spectacular and mundane, amusing and redemptive.

Today documentary cameras are everywhere. Yet no one is capturing how we spend the majority of our lives, year after year, day after day, hour after hour – in other words, the record of how we work.

Using a timeless cinéma vérité aesthetic, independent filmmaker Daniel Kraus captures the sights, sounds, and textures of different American jobs, without the accompaniment of interviews or a musical score. Each chapter reveals the surprising, engaging, even redemptive routines of hard-working men and women across all 50 States.

Although each film is humble in its approach, seen as a whole the WORK series is epic in scope, creating what could become an essential historical document of modern American life.

The next two films are Professor, featuring Jay Holstein of the University of Iowa’s department of Religious Studies; and Preacher, featuring Bishop William Nowell of New Covenant Pentecostal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Daniel Kraus lives in Chicago, where he works as a librarian. Before starting the WORK series, he directed the controversial documentary Jefftowne, and the baseball thriller Ball of Wax.