In addition to its own independent documentary projects, Flying Pieces Productions specializes in producing engaging documentary-style videos for nonprofits, and archival video documentation for artists, performers and individuals. We offer customized producing, directing, shooting and editing.  For education, fundraising, special events, and website content.

Clients include University of MN Department of Epidemiology, Illusion Theater, Pillsbury House Theatre, Upstream Arts, Alzheimer’s Association, and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, Wayside House, Inc.

Please contact us with any inquiries about your production needs.

bio.

Director/Producer Norah Shapiro

After more than a decade as a public defender, Ms. Shapiro found herself drawn toward documentary filmmaking as a vehicle for continued exploration of the complexities, paradoxes, and complications of human existence.  She dove into documentary production via an intensive summer program at the Maine Media Workshops and immediately went to work.  Her first short film, “A Sacred Heart,” a profile of Minnesota poet Phebe Hanson, won the “Emerging Filmmaker” Award in the Minnesota History Center’s Greatest Generation Film Festival.  She recently completed her first feature-length documentary “If You Dare” about a Minneapolis theater company that mentors at-risk children. “If You Dare” premiered at the 2009 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, and was an official selection at the 2009 Docs for Sale at IDFA in Amsterdam. For her next project, “Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile,” Norah has traveled several times to Dharamsala, India, home of the exiled Tibetan Government to explore the role of a western-style beauty pageant in a culture that has traditionally prized inner beauty over the “skin deep,” in the context of a protracted Tibetan struggle to survive in the face of exile, diaspora, and the increasing influence of western pop culture. In July 2008 she was awarded a production grant from the Jerome Foundation and anticipates completion of the feature documentary in 2010. In addition, she produces short advocacy videos for a variety of local non-profits and has recently begun co-producing a feature documentary about life in post-war Bosnia.