--- name: "Andrew Jarecki" canonical: "https://film.one/person/andrew-jarecki" roles: ["Actor","Creator","Director","Producer"] born: "24 March 1963" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T05:03:18.630457+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Andrew Jarecki Actor and creator. Born 24 March 1963 in New York City, New York, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Actor, Creator, Director, Producer - **Born:** 24 March 1963, New York City, New York, USA - **Active:** 2003–2015 - **Also known as:** Эндрю Джареки - **Works often with:** Marc Smerling ## Fi1m on Andrew Jarecki > Andrew Jarecki gets people to say things no lawyer would allow and then holds the shot. His documentaries are superbly cut and hard to stop watching; the question, with *The Jinx* above all, is how much of the verdict is evidence and how much is editing. Andrew Jarecki's best moments are the ones after the answer. In *The Jinx* (2015) Robert Durst sits in a dark room, blinking, and describes cutting up a body in Galveston, Texas, in 2001, in the voice most people keep for a bad afternoon at the tip. The question is finished; the camera stays. Those held seconds, which the editors could have trimmed and did not, are where Jarecki does his work. He gets people to talk, and then he declines to rescue them from what they have said. He came to this sideways. He co-founded Moviefone, sold it in 1999, and made a short about birthday clowns that grew into *Capturing the Friedmans* (2003), a feature built from a family's home videos and interviews about a 1980s child-abuse investigation. That film set two accounts of a crime against each other and refused to choose between them, and it is still the clearest statement of what interests him: how ordinary people end up inside something monstrous, and what the record looks like afterwards. He then tried fiction. *All Good Things* (2010), a drama loosely based on Durst, was received coolly and has had little life since. Its real consequence was that Durst saw it and rang him. That call gave him some 20 hours of interviews and six episodes, first shown on 8 February 2015. The series has seven credited editors, Zac Stuart-Pontier among them, who understand that a long pause is more damning than any voiceover. David Paul Jacobson and Marc Smerling, Jarecki's partner on three films and his fellow producer on *Catfish* (2010), shoot Durst close with nothing behind him but his own face. We will admit that by the fourth episode we were enjoying Durst's company, dry and odd and now and then funny, and then he would mention a saw and we would remember what we had been laughing at. The programme is built to produce that lurch, and it does. It is also where the doubts begin. The Friedmans film withheld a verdict; *The Jinx* delivers one, with slow-motion reenactments and a swelling score, the tools of a thriller rather than a case file. By the last two episodes Jarecki and Smerling are on screen themselves, on the telephone and in edit suites, and the series has become a story about their chase. That is gripping. It also leaves the people Durst is accused of harming with a fraction of his time. A filmmaker who has spoken of "trying to really understand the mechanics underneath" monster stories has here built an effective machine of his own. He returned to Durst with a second part of *The Jinx* in 2024 and moved on to Alabama's prisons in *The Alabama Solution* (2025), which he also wrote. We have not reviewed either. On what we have seen, Jarecki is a fine editor of other people's confessions and a less reliable judge of when to stop. Watch *The Jinx*, and notice what the music is asking you to feel before the facts have arrived. ## Biography Andrew Jarecki is an American filmmaker. He is the director, producer and creator of the documentary series *The Jinx* (2015), for which he also appears as self. He directed the documentary film *Capturing the Friedmans* (2003) and the narrative feature *All Good Things* (2010). Jarecki co-founded the film information service Moviefone and graduated from Princeton University. He is the brother of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki and half-brother of filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. *The Jinx* won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *The Jinx* (2015), Fi1m 77, as Self — [page](https://film.one/tv/the-jinx.md) ## Also credited on (not yet reviewed) - *Capturing the Friedmans* (2003), Director, Producer ## Also known for - *All Good Things* (2010), Director - *The Alabama Solution* (2025), Director, Writer --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/andrew-jarecki