Harry Shunk, a once internationally known photographer, had become a reclusive hoarder, rarely leaving his apartment in the West Village in New York City. The day came when a terrible odor alerted a security guard. It took three sweeps by the police to discover Shunk’s body trapped upside down in piles of papers seven feet high. Shunk left no heirs and Darryl Kelly was hired to get rid of the stuff.

Six days and seven dumpsters were needed to finish the job. On the last day, Darryl had a hunch, and backing up his truck to the site, he took some of the boxes and portfolios, brought them home and put them in his closet.

There they stayed, until one night, depressed and overwhelmed by hard times, Darryl saw something. A shadow passed down the hall and vanished into the closet. When Darryl opened the closet door, he looked up at a photograph of a swath of orange fabric that spanned the entire width of a canyon. Thinking it might be valuable, the next day he brought it and some of the other art to show the building manager who had hired him. “Are you ready to retire?” he was asked.

Alexandra Moltke Isles, filmmaker spent her summers with her grandmother in Denmark and the rest of the year in New York where her father was a permanent member of the Danish Mission to the United Nations and her mother was an editor at VOGUE.  Growing up as a U.N. brat honed her sensitivity to injustice and a theme running through all her work is social justice and dignity for the outsider.  Her passion for research was developed during her years as Researcher and then Assistant Curator at New York’s Museum of Radio & Television, now the Paley Center of Media. A research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities launched her filmmaking career.

Alexandra’s history-based documentaries are as notable for the memorable personalities interviewed as for their integrity and the richness of their archival material. Three of her films had special screenings at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Alexandra has also been an interviewer for Stephen Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project and an ESL tutor at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. She is currently a volunteer school guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

http://www.alexandraisles.com