Kunhardts Expand Life Stories Platform With Unseen Footage From Decades Of Documentary Filmmaking

Life Stories, the nonprofit created by the Kunhardt family of documentary filmmakers, has relaunched its sprawling digital platform with thousands of films, interviews and personal stories, many new to the site, in an free and more easily searchable collection.

LifeStories.org, co-founded by brothers George and Teddy Kunhardt of Kunhardt Films, was built for educators, students and curious members of the public to provide firsthand perspectives, connect people and ideas across history, and turn individual stories into resources for learning and exploration. Over decades of the family’s documentary filmmaking, they, and the site, amassed more than 13,000 segments and over 500 hours of interviews, including conversations with Warren Buffett, Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, Yo-Yo Ma, Gloria Estefan and others.

The redesign, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies through its Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture, includes new Search, Ask and Discover features that makes it easier for users to move across subjects, including history, civic life, leadership, creativity, equality and social change, and discover connections they might not find through a traditional search. Hundreds of unique tags now sort some 400+ interviews into 11,000 short segments, which the site calls stories. Users can search by person, subject, idea or moment in history.

A Google Classroom integration for educators helps bring selected stories into lessons and curriculum materials.

“As artificial intelligence makes facts and data easier to access, Life Stories is focused on preserving something less easily generated: how people experienced events, developed ideas, created change, overcame adversity and reached conclusions,” the organization said.

“The power of this collection lies in the connections between people’s experiences,” said George Kunhardt. “The new platform makes those connections easier to discover, whether someone is exploring a moment in history, an idea, another person or a question in their own life.”

“With thousands of stories in the collection, the challenge has been to help people find the ones that speak directly to what they want to understand,” said Teddy Kunhardt.

The relaunch features a new season of original free programming on the platform including two films hitting the site today: Behind Her Eyes, a short film following one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz as she transforms her story of survival into a mission to teach young people about the Holocaust on TikTok; and Becoming Katharine Graham, a portrait of a shy woman who found the strength to stand up to President Nixon, transforming The Washington Post into one of the most consequential newspapers of the 20th century.

Other upcoming fall content includes Season 4 of interview series The Thread; Fragments of Paradise, a feature documentary based on home movies, video diaries and personal recordings of filmmaker Jonas Mekas; and Mario,a feature doc on Mario Cuomo’s journey from a poor son of Italian immigrants in Queens to three-term governor of New York.

Pleasantville, New York-based Kunhardt Films was founded in its current form by their father Peter Kunhardt in 1987 and is run by the three of them. Films include Fragments of Paradise; Apple TV series Lincoln’s Dilemma; and HBO series A Choice of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks and Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union.

The brothers launched Life Stories to preserve documentary interviews and films for public and future use. They were struck in particular by the experience of making Emmy-winning HBO documentary King in the Wilderness where they recorded 37 hours with 19 of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest friends and advisors but only a fraction could make it into the finished film. Rather than allow those accounts to disappear onto a shelf, they preserved them, turning the underlying interviews become an explorable body of work themselves.