Edgar Burcksen(1947-2024)

Edgar Burcksen, ACE moved to California after a successful career in The Netherlands as a feature film editor with more than 15 features and a Dutch Film Festival Award for his body of work to his credit. In California, he became supervising editor of "Seabert," a Saturday Morning Cartoon for French television, later acquired and televised by HBO. After the completion of 52 episodes he was hired by Colossal Pictures in San Francisco where he set up the editorial department and collaborated on numerous commercials for Levi's, General Motors, Budweiser, Disney, etc. and music videos for The Grateful Dead and Thomas Dolby.

Burcksen's prowess in visual effects was noticed by ILM and they hired him to become the visual effects editor on The Hunt for Red October (1990) and later Diehard 2 (1990). As one of the early fans of non-linear editing he became an expert in the use of the Editdroid, George Lucas' invention to pull editing out of the dark ages of film. When Lucas started his production of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992), he asked Edgar Burcksen to set up the postproduction for his prestigious TV series and also to become one of the editors. His collaboration with George Lucas on the pilot Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal (1992) earned him an Emmy® for best editing in 1992. Soon after, Burcksen served as editor and postproduction supervisor on "500 Nations" (1995) an 8-hour documentary miniseries for CBS about Native Americans hosted and produced by Kevin Costner.

In 1996 he edited Colors Straight Up (1997), which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards®. The feature film Lunker Lake (1997) won at the Santa Clarita Family Film Festival and his teaming up with actor/director Jeroen Krabbé on the feature Left Luggage (1998) with Isabella Rossellini, Maximilian Schell, Chaim Topol and Marianne Saegebrecht brought 4 prestigious awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998. The documentaries In Search of Peace (2001, for the Wiesenthal Center), The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania (2005) produced by David Hunt and Patricia Heaton and Borrowing Time (2006) were complimented with the independent feature films Purple Heart (2005) about the Iraq war with William Sadler and Mel Harris, the teen dramedy School of Life (2005) with Ryan Reynolds and David Paymer, the family film The Tillamook Treasure (2006), the action film Road House 2 and the tense drama Brothers Three, An American Gothic (2007) with John Heard, Patrick Wilson and Neal McDonough. Burcksen's diverse experience over the complete spectrum of film genres made him director Ted Braun's first choice to execute his innovative ideas to edit Darfur Now (2007) which earned him an ACE Eddie Award nomination. Recent documentaries include, Bluetopia, SOS (State Of Security), Last Hijack, Hollywood Banker, License to Operate, 100 Years and Unlikely; recent indie feature films are Politics of Love, A New York Heartbeat and Losing in Love.

Edgar Burcksen is an avid cyclist who rides100 miles every week with his Brentwood cycling club LaGrange, he is a member of the Editors Guild, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, he served the Board of Directors of ACE for many years and was the Editor in Chief of ACE's magazine CinemaEditor for more than 17 years. For his contributions during his tenure as Editor in Chief of CinemaEditor he received the prestigious Robert Wise Award during the 2011 ACE Eddie Awards. He is fluent in English, German, French and of course Dutch.