David Holbrooke

David Holbrooke is the director of The Diplomat. He first attended Mountainfilm in 1999 and was hooked when he saw Genghis Blues, followed by a performance by the film’s star, Kongar Ol-Ondar. David returned to the festival as a filmmaker several times with Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, Time for a New God, Freaks Like Me and A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn, which features acclaimed nature photographer James Balog. David's feature documentary, Hard As Nails, was a Mountainfilm 2007 award winner. Before he became a filmmaker, David spent a year in the dotcom world. For the first half of his career, he worked in television news, producing long-form pieces for "The Today Show," CBS News and CNN. David has been a contributing editor at GQ and written for The Huffington Post and CNN.com. His production company, Giraffe Partners, is working on several documentaries. While he long ago lost count of how many films he's watched in the last decade, he still gets wildly excited by a great, well-told story.