David Novack
Director / Producer/ Sound Designer

IMDB

David Novack directed, wrote, and produced the new award-winning documentary film All Static & Noise (2023) about the contemporary Uyghur genocide in China. Prior to this, he made Finding Babel (Special Jury Prize, Moscow Jewish Film Festival), about executed Soviet writer Isaac Babel, and Burning The Future: Coal in America (IDA Pare Lorentz Award for social documentary,  Best In-Depth Television Reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists) about rights activists in West Virginia. David also produced Kimjongilia (Sundance, Best Human Rights Documentary/One World Brussels FilmFest) about North Korean labor camps.
 
A former lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, David teaches sound and cinema at Lusófona University in Lisbon.  With degrees in engineering (Penn) and music (Berklee) and a PhD in Media Arts/Sound (Lusófona), David has enjoyed an award-winning career in sound design and re-recording mixing for dozens of films.  Highlights include Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, Larry Clark’s Kids, and Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco.  In live theater, David designed sound for an international opera by Roger Waters (Ça Ira), sound/projections for the Papp Theater’s presentation of Death of a Salesman in Yiddish, and most recently sound for a science-in-art international exhibition, Space Messengers, in Portugal. 

Mr. Novack toured with Burning the Future to China and Ukraine with the American Documentary Showcase, sponsored by the US Department of State.  With the program, Mr. Novack lectured extensively at universities and film festivals and was profiled in magazines and television programs.

Mr. Novack produced Kimjongilia, a documentary about N. Korean refugees that premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and enjoyed a theatrical run at the International Documentary Association’s Docuweeks Theatrical Showcase. Kimjongilia aired in the US and abroad.  The film won the 2010 best human rights documentary award from the One World Brussels Film Fest of the Human Rights and Democracy Network.