Michael Roemer

Michael Roemer (January 1, 1928 – May 20, 2025) was a German-born American film director, producer and writer. He won several awards for his films, which include Nothing But a Man and The Plot Against Harry. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor at Yale University for over 50 years, he was the author of Telling Stories.

Early life Roemer was born on January 1, 1928, to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 and began restricting the rights of Jews to work, his father and his grandfather found themselves unable to work and provide for the family, and eventually lost everything. At the age of 11, Roemer was sent out of Germany In England, he attended Bunce Court School, a German Jewish school for refugees, both pupils and staff. There, he met Wilhelm Marckwald, an actor and former director of the Deutsches Theater Berlin and also a refugee. The playwright Frank Marcus and the painter Frank Auerbach were two of his friends at Bunce Court. Roemer emigrated to the United States in 1945.

Roemer received his A.B. degree from Harvard University in 1949. While at Harvard, he directed his first film, A Touch of the Times, possibly the first feature film produced at an American college. After graduating, he worked for Louis de Rochemont for eight years as a production manager, film editor, and as an assistant director. He later wrote, produced and directed a series of educational films for the Ford Foundation.

Independent filmmaker His feature-length film, Nothing But a Man won two awards at the Venice Film Festival, Discovering that the technician who was making the transfer was laughing hard at the film, Roemer decided to make two 35 mm prints and submitted them to film festivals in New York and Toronto. Both festivals accepted the film and commercial distribution and acclaim followed.

Roemer began teaching at Yale University in 1966 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He retired in 2017. He then made two films for that network's American Playhouse series: Pilgrim, Farewell (1980) and Haunted (1984).

He was interviewed for Melissa Hacker's 1996 documentary about the Kindertransports, My Knees Were Jumping. In Screen Slate, A.S. Hamrah wrote that discovering a Roemer film as good as Nothing But a Man and The Plot Against Harry "is a cause for celebration, and something of a miracle."

Personal life and death In 1953, Roemer married educator Barbara Balze (died 2007), and they had three children.