Bill Jersey

William Clifford Jersey Jr. (June 9, 1927 – July 24, 2026) was an American documentary filmmaker and painter. He was a leading figure in the history of American documentary filmmaking and a pioneer of the cinéma vérité movement. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, Jersey produced a large body of work. His films probed fractured and sensitive areas of the American experience such as racism, religious fundamentalism, gang violence, judicial activism, and the psychology of war. Jersey's contribution to the documentary form is defined by his approach to "act of faith" filmmaking, a methodology that rejects scripted narratives in favor of capturing the spontaneous truths of human interaction. This approach yielded his seminal work, A Time for Burning (1966), a film that documented the Civil Rights struggles within the Lutheran Church and became a historical artifact inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry. His work has garnered the industry's highest honors, including two Academy Award nominations, two George Foster Peabody Awards, and multiple Emmy Awards.