--- name: "Elyse Steinberg" canonical: "https://film.one/person/elyse-steinberg" fi1m_id: "elyse-steinberg" imdb_id: "nm0825748" tmdb_id: 1561683 wikidata_id: "Q24686948" roles: ["Producer","Director"] born: "1 January 1979" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "producer" average_over: 0 updated: "2026-10-02T23:46:28.901678+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." --- # Elyse Steinberg ## Identity Elyse Steinberg - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/elyse-steinberg - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** elyse-steinberg - **IMDb ID:** nm0825748 - **TMDB ID:** 1561683 - **Wikidata ID:** Q24686948 - **Same entity:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24686948, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0825748/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1561683 Producer and director. Born 1 January 1979 in USA. ## Details - **Work:** Producer, Director - **Born:** 1 January 1979, USA - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24686948, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0825748/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1561683 ## Streaming the US now - **AMC+:** [*Weiner*](https://film.one/film/weiner.md) (75) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Elyse Steinberg > Elyse Steinberg gets a camera into rooms most documentary makers never reach and then keeps it running, with no narration and no verdict. *Weiner* shows how gripping that can be, and how much it leaves for the viewer to decide. The thing Steinberg's films do is stay. A campaign is falling apart on the evening news and the camera is in the candidate's flat; his wife asks whether it has to be there, and it stays. In *Weiner* (2016), which Steinberg co-directed and produced with Josh Kriegman, that question is asked more than once, and the film's only answer is to keep filming. There is no voice-over and nobody steps in to tell us what we have just watched. That is the method, and it is the whole picture. She came up through documentary television, directing and producing for PBS, including *The Trial of Saddam Hussein* (2008) for the *America at a Crossroads* series. With Kriegman she founded Edgeline Films, later joined by Eli Despres, who edits. *Weiner* was the breakthrough. Kriegman had worked for Anthony Weiner in Congress, which is how the camera got through the door of the 2013 mayoral campaign, and the two of them were still filming when the campaign collapsed. Since then she has co-directed and produced *The Fight* (2020), following ACLU lawyers through four cases on immigration, reproductive rights, voting and transgender military service, and created and co-directed *Couples Therapy* (2019–), which puts the same patient camera inside a therapist's room. What works is the access and what she does with it. Hundreds of hours of footage become 96 minutes that are funny, horrible and hard to look away from, and the funny parts matter: the staff's exhaustion, the jokes made in the car, the ordinary business of a day while the day is going wrong. The scene we cannot shake is Huma Abedin at the kitchen counter after the news has broken, looking at a point somewhere past her husband while he talks. We wanted the camera to turn away. It did not, and neither did we, and we came out of the film ashamed of ourselves in a way few documentaries manage. What does not work is harder to see because it is an absence. *Weiner* never decides what it thinks of the man it is watching. Steinberg has said she wanted "a complex and nuanced portrait of a person who had just been reduced to a caricature and a punchline", and that is a fair aim, but a portrait that declines to judge hands the judging to us. With Weiner the material is so strong that we did the work happily. Reviews of *The Fight* suggest the gap is more visible there: the four-case structure was found divided when events moved faster than the film, and the result was called an admiring portrait of the ACLU rather than an examination of it. The access keeps coming, and access is the rarest thing in documentary. What we would like next is a film in which Steinberg is prepared to make herself less welcome once the door has closed behind her. ## Biography Elyse Steinberg is an American documentary producer and director. She co-directed and produced the 2016 feature *Weiner* with Josh Kriegman, which premiered at Sundance and received a BAFTA nomination for Best Documentary. She co-founded Edgeline Films and has directed and produced further work including the 2020 feature *The Fight*, which won a Sundance Special Jury Award, and the Showtime series *Couples Therapy* (2019–), on which she serves as co-creator, director and executive producer. Earlier credits include directing the PBS feature *The Trial of Saddam Hussein* and work for the PBS series *Need to Know*. Steinberg graduated from Brown University. She was named one of Variety’s Top Ten Documakers to Watch in 2016. *Weiner* also won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. *Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org, collab.sundance.org, aidc.com.au.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Weiner* (2016), Fi1m 75, Director, Producer — [page](https://film.one/film/weiner.md) ## Complete filmography (4) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *SPERMWORLD* (2024), Executive Producer - *The Fight* (2020), Director, Producer - *Weiner* (2016), Director, Producer — Fi1m 75, [page](https://film.one/film/weiner.md) - *Poison* (1991), as Little Girl ("Horror") --- © 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/elyse-steinberg