Pare Lorentz Jr., the son of the legendary documentary pioneer Pare Lorentz, died this past Friday at his home in Frankfort, Kentucky. He was 73.
Lorentz, a graduate of Harvard University, made a number of industrial films and documentaries in the 1970s and early 80s. But he was especially instrumental to the International Documentary Association in helping to establish the IDA/Pare Lorentz Award, which, since 1997, has honored documentaries that best reflect the spirit and aesthetic vision of Lorentz Senior, addressing the issues he cared about--the environment and social justice--and how those issues are rendered cinematically.
Over the years, the IDA/Pare Lorentz Award has gone to such films as Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke (2007) and Charles Guggenheimn's Berga: Soldiers of Another War (2003), and Lorentz Jr. served on the award's Blue Ribbon Committee from the very beginning.
Lorentz Jr. also provided invaluable support and counsel for IDA's Pare Lorentz Film Festival, launched in 2007 through a grant from The New York Community Trust
For more information, here's an obituary from the Frankfort State-Journal