USA | 2010 | colour | 60 min
dir | Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese pro | Martin Scorsese, Emma Tillinger Koskoff wr | Kent Jones Martin Scorsese ph | Mark Raker mus | Scott Lehrer, Leslie Stifelman ed | Rachel Reichman cast | Martin Scorsese, Elia Kazan dis | Echo Bridge Entertainment

“A Letter To Elia” is Martin Scorsese’s intensely personal and deeply moving tribute to the films of director Elia Kazan. Kazan’s body of work, including “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”, “Gentleman’s Agreement”, “On The Waterfront” and “East of Eden”, captivated Scorsese as a young man, mirroring his life story and inspiring him to become a filmmaker. Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing. “A Letter to Elia” takes a close look not only at a particular person, but at the life of art and its creation – the work, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience. In an author’s statement about “A Letter to Elia” Scorsese and his collaborator Kent Jones write about their motivations: “We wanted to do justice to Kazan as a person, as a historical figure, most of all as an artist; but we also wanted to do justice to the power of the films themselves, which have a life of their own.”

DIRECTOR | Martin Charles Scorsese  (1942)
American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He is the founder of the World Cinema Foundation and a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema. Scorsese has won a number of awards, among them Oscars, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America. Scorsese’s body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, and violence. Scorsese is acknowledged as one of the most significant and influential American filmmakers of his era, directing landmark films such as “Mean Streets”, “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull”, “Goodfellas” and “Casino”.