Bennett Stein
Bennett Stein, Director
Bennett Stein was born in Paris to a CIA agent mom — an actual covert ops-conducting/Soviet nuke-counting spy during the Cold War — and a father who ran a CIA front organization, The Committee For Cultural Freedom, set up to extract writers and other thought criminals from East European imprisonment. Back in the states, his parents founded Stein & Day Publishers, which put noted black writer James Baldwin on the map and launched notorious film director Elia Kazan into his own second act as a novelist. As a lad, Stein accompanied his dad to edit sessions on Kazan ‘s final film, THE LAST TYCOON. He would never be the same.
Bennett began his career as a personal assistant to celebrated actor William Hurt. After acting in over 25 plays himself and in films such as A TIME OF DESTINY with Hurt and Timothy Hutton, and AUTO MOTIVES with Robert Downey, Jr., Bennett proved his directing capabilities with several off-Broadway plays, mostly notably the world premiere of THE DOG INSIDE THE MAN by Matthew Carnahan, creator of DIRT, the 2007 episodic for the FX Channel. Stein then directed the short films MOTEL JERUSALEM, a festival hit whose run included the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, and NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, shown in several film fests in LA and NY. THE DIVIDED is his feature film debut.
