Kirk Simon, Oscar-Winning Documentarian, Dies at 63

Kirk Simon, a documentary filmmaker who turned luminaries in the arts into teachers and brought cameras into the classroom, memorably in an Academy Award-winning film about a multinational school in Israel, died on April 14 in Manhattan. He was 63.

His brother, Ron, said Simon suffered cardiac arrest and was declared dead after he was taken to a hospital.

Simon directed and produced documentaries for PBS, National Geographic and HBO, tackling a wide range of topics. But he often returned to education, as he and his creative partner, Karen Goodman, his first wife, did in 2010 with “Strangers No More,” which won the Oscar for best short documentary.

That film focused on the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, where children, many of them refugees or migrants from more than 48 countries, came together to learn and adapt to life in their new home. Many had endured extreme hardship and had little schooling.

The film depicted a school filled with motivated teachers and eager children exuding hope and seeking opportunity.

“It’s like its own model United Nations,” Simon told The New York Times in 2011. “The children have figured out how to get along with children from all other countries.”

Beginning in 2010, he and Goodman produced and directed many episodes of “Masterclass,” an HBO series in which artists like Plácido Domingo, Frank Gehry, Liv Ullmann and Alan Alda taught classes for gifted youths. The episode featuring Alda won an Emmy for outstanding children’s program in 2015.

Alda, the actor best known for his work on “M*A*S*H” and “The West Wing,” said in a telephone interview that Simon whittled three days of shooting down to a half-hour while retaining “not only the essential elements” of the extended shoot “but the flavor of it and the subtleties of it.”

“He organized several conversational moments between me and the kids,” Alda said, “one in a restaurant, one in Central Park, one just walking down the street, and partly it was to introduce visual variety, but it also put us in situations that allowed us to talk heart-to-heart with each other.”

Ullmann, the Norwegian actress and director known for her work with Ingmar Bergman, was the subject of Simon’s documentary “The Sealed Orders of Liv Ullmann” (2009) as well as a “Masterclass” segment.

She said she had sought out Simon for candid advice about her work because “he could be very direct, not a flattering man.”

Simon focused on Jane Goodall and her work with chimpanzees in Africa in the documentary “Chimps: So Like Us” (1990); took an in-depth look at a classroom in Nyack, New York, on the HBO miniseries “Kindergarten” (2001); and produced episodes of the Logo Channel series “Coming Out Stories,” in which gay and lesbian people revealed their sexual orientation on camera.

His most recent completed film was “The Pulitzer at 100,” a feature-length documentary released in 2016 for the prize’s centennial.

Ken Burns, the award-winning documentarian known for his historical series, was a classmate of Simon’s at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In a telephone interview, he said Simon’s body of work displayed a “sensitivity to these cruxes in our society, whether it’s coming out, whether it’s children and education — these really interested him, and he was voracious in pursuing them.”

Kirk Robert Simon was born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1954, to the former Emily Luzenburg, a real estate manager, and Samuel Simon, a banker. He grew up in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.

He became obsessed with photography in junior high school and later left Cheltenham High School for an alternative school that let him concentrate on the subject.

After he graduated he went to Hampshire, an innovative college that largely allowed students to devise their own curriculums. He studied under photographers Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes. Besides Burns, his schoolmates included Goodman and their fellow documentary filmmakers Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires.

Burns said Simon worked with him on his final student film, “Working in Rural New England,” a documentary about Old Sturbridge Village, a living-history museum in Massachusetts. The film featured early examples of techniques that Burns became famous for, like panning over a still photograph.

Simon graduated in 1976 and moved to New York. He and Goodman began dating and working together after she graduated from Hampshire, and they married in 1987. They formed the Simon and Goodman Picture Co. in 1990. They divorced in 2011.

Simon later married Mina Farbood. In addition to her and his brother, who is the curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media in New York, he is survived by a daughter, Allegra, and a son, Oliver, from his first marriage; a daughter, Maya, from his second; and three grandchildren.