Running the Sahara

James Moll is a film director and producer.

His company, Allentown Productions, has been based at Universal Studios since 1994, primarily producing film and television projects focused on stories of non-fiction.

Moll graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1987.

He began his professional career as an intern reading scripts for film producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who later hired him as an assistant to French writer-director Francis Veber for Veber’s American remake of “Les Fugitifs” (Three Fugitives).

Moll serves on the Executive Committee of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is co-chair of the Documentary Award for the Directors Guild of America.

James Moll directed the 2011 feature documentary Foo Fighters: Back and Forth, profiling the career of the rock band Foo Fighters, which is led by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

Moll is director and producer of the 2008 feature-length documentary Running the Sahara about three men who ran 4,300 miles across the Sahara desert from Senegal to Egypt. Matt Damon is the executive producer of the film, which promotes the H2O Africa Foundation, co-founded by Damon to raise awareness of clean water initiatives in Africa.

In 2009, Moll was nominated for two Emmy Awards, winning one of them, from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for Inheritance. The film profiles Monika Göth Hertwig and her struggle dealing with her father’s involvement in The Holocaust. Monika’s father, S.S. Captain Amon Göth, was executed for war crimes in 1946. Amon Göth attained international notoriety after being portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the movie Schindler’s List.

He directed and produced the feature-length documentary Price for Peace, which premiered prime time on NBC on Memorial Day 2002, hosted by Tom Brokaw. The late author Stephen Ambrose and Steven Spielberg are the executive producers. The film focuses on America’s involvement in the Pacific Theater of Operations during WWII. It was produced in collaboration with DreamWorks and the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

In March 1999, James Moll received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for directing The Last Days. Steven Spielberg is executive producer of the film, which chronicles the lives of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.

Moll is Founding Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (also known as the Shoah Foundation), having established the non-profit organization with June Beallor in 1994 for Steven Spielberg. Moll and Beallor ran the day-to-day operations the Shoah Foundation from its inception in 1994 until 1998, and later worked with the foundation on the production of documentaries. The goal of the Shoah Foundation was to collect tens of thousands of videotaped testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust around the world. Within five years, the number of testimonies in the archive was over 52,000, in thirty-two languages. —Wikipedia