Ilan Ziv was born in Israel in 1950 and came to the United States after fighting in the Yom Kippur (The October) War in 1973. He’s a graduate of New York University film school, and in 1978 he co-produced New York’s first Middle East Film Festival. 

He has directed dozens of documentaries dealing broadly with issues of human rights and investigations of contemporary history. Known for ARTE’s mini-series Capitalism (2014), BBC’s Exile A Myth Unearthed (2011), an investigation into the political ramifications of the myth of the Exile of the Jews, PBS’s Jesus Politics: The Bible and the Ballot (2008), a personal examination of the role of religion in American politics, PBS’s Six Days: The War That Changed the Middle East (2007)  and Human Weapon (2002) hailed by The New York Times as “gripping and important.”