Biography

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Peter Sanders comes from a long line of filmmakers with a storied tradition in cinema who collectively have won five Oscars and two nominations. He holds a graduate degree in broadcast journalism from New York University and an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Vermont. Sanders' range of interests include penetrating portraits of artists (Altina, 2014); state-sponsored persecution and terror during a national holocaust (The Disappeared, 2008); and scientific achievements (On the Shoulders of Giants: The History of NYU Langone Orthopedics, 2023). His first feature-length film, The Disappeared (2008), was awarded a special prize for Best Documentary by the Documentary and Fiction Festival of Hollywood in 2007. Featured at the Montréal World Film Festival (2008), the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana (2008), and SANFIC, the International Film Festival of Santiago de Chile (2008), the film was shown and sponsored by the United Nations (2007). After its premiere at movie theaters in Argentina, Chile, and Canada, it was broadcast on The History Channel networks and The Documentary Channel. It has been on Netflix since 2008. Importantly, the film has been acquired by hundreds of academic institutions worldwide. The Disappeared (2008) summons the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War (1976-1983) through the experience of Horacio Pietragalla, a young man raised by the maid of the officer who kidnapped him after the military brutally murdered his parents. The film follows Horacio as he reconstructs the cause for which his real parents gave their lives, and, through this search, reclaims his true identity. This personal journey internalizes the tragedy that ravaged the country for seven years and exposes polarized views on state-driven terrorism in groundbreaking interviews with top military officials, concentration camp victims, and members of Horacio's surrogate and biological families.

Altina (2014) is the story of a wealthy avant-garde New York artist who invented the Harlequin or cat-eye glasses which launched a fashion craze in the 1930s and who also created a unique brand of functional sculptures. Altina happens to be Peter Sanders' paternal grandmother. In 2013, Altina won the David A. Stein Memorial Prize for Best Documentary and Best Director at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. It was also featured at the Sarasota International Film Festival (2012), Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival (2013), and the Denver and Washington D.C. Jewish Film Festival (2014). In 2014, through a partnership with Submarine Entertainment and First Run Features, Altina was released theatrically at the IFC theater in New York and the Lemmle Music Hall theater in Los Angeles. Altina Schinasi (1907-1999) was a paradox. Altina is an affecting, provocative, and richly informative documentary about an American trendsetter who anticipated feminism by decades. Free of academic constraints and confident in her keen intellect, she crafted fragments of her life into sculptures that defined her surreal and original world. Her whimsical art was also anchored in social issues: her film on George Grosz took on the Holocaust, earning her an Oscar nomination. She befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and supported his struggle.

Selected as a finalist for a Jury Prize at the 2024 Tribeca X Film Festival, On the Shoulders of Giants: The History of NYU Langone Orthopedics (2023) captures 120 years of medical history and the scientific achievements that shaped the specialty as practiced in this world-renowned New York hospital. Towering over the cast of forty characters animating this one-hour documentary are a number of physicians who found refuge from antisemitism at the hospital first established in 1905 by Henry and Herman Frauenthal. Henry, who survived the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic following his marriage in Europe, had completed medical training under Bellevue's Dr. Lewis Albert Sayre, the first professor of orthopedics in the United States. When he returned to New York City he continued expanding the self-funded, family-run institution dedicated to orthopedic care that tended to underserved and dispossessed people of every faith in what is now Harlem. Among notable achievements in the field, the film spotlights Dr. Marian Frauenthal Sloane, the first female orthopedic surgeon to be published in an academic journal and Dr. J. Serge Parisien, who helped develop modern arthroscopic surgery through his work at the Hospital for Joint Diseases. Interviews with Mr. Kenneth Langone, Dr. Robert I. Grossman, Dr. Joseph D. Zuckerman, and Dr. Kenneth A. Egol feature prominently throughout the film, presently available through the following platforms: Apple TV, ITunes, Amazon, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, XBOX, Microsoft, Cable VOD, Fandango NOW, Canopy, and Dish TV.

In addition to formal education at the University of Vermont, where he majored in History, and after graduating from NYU with a Master's Degree in Broadcast Journalism (2006), Peter Sanders can claim an insatiable pursuit of exploration that took him to Argentina in his 20s, where he taught English to professionals in Buenos Aires, took his first classes in acting, and spent several months trekking through Patagonia; and traveling throughout Europe on several occasions. He expresses his worldliness by saying that he feels equally at home in Hollywood, where he was born; Argentina, where he spent two years as a child; Denton, Texas, where he grew up; and in New York, where he settled after attending the Stella Adler Studio of Acting for two years and appearing on off-Broadway plays like at the Lincoln Center before plunging into broadcast journalism and filmmaking. Since 2012 he resides in Cold Spring, NY, where his pride and joy are his wife and his two boys.

Peter Sanders's filmmaking reflects how deeply he has studied the masters of cinema who preceded him. As a young child he was exposed to filmmaking by his father, Denis Sanders, a two-time Oscar winning director, who is best known for such iconic films as Elvis: That's The Way It Is (1970), Soul to Soul (1972), and Czechoslovakia 1968, awarded an Academy Award in 1970, and whose early films featured a newly discovered Robert Redford and George Hamilton. Peter's father passed away when he was 18 but his laconic wit lives on in how Peter approaches his subjects. He is also a member of a family that can claim three generations of filmmakers, with Altina Schinasi (the matriarch) being nominated for an Oscar for Interregnum (1960), a film she made about her art teacher George Grosz; Denis Sanders and his brother Terry, who won an Oscar for the classic A Time Out of War (1954) they made together and received separate awards thereafter; and third-generation cousins Jessica and Peter Sanders. In 2024, Peter Sanders's On the Shoulders of Giants: The History of NYU Langone Orthopedics was nominated for best feature film at the Tribeca X Film Festival; Altina won Best Director and Best Film at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (2013); and The Disappeared was honored with a special prize for Best Documentary at the Documentary and Fiction Film Festival of Hollywood (2007).
- IMDb mini biography by: Mark Robhm