About Michael Engel

As of recent, I was fortunate to take a luncheon meeting, (on advice from a friend of mine who had made the initial introduction) with a young film/TV director from both New York City and Rio de Janeiro… his name…Michael Edward Engel.

As Founder/CEO/Director of Engel Productions, Inc., in Los Angeles, CA, Michael Engel has had some very interesting cultural diversification for all of his thirty-four years…

Michael Engel has done, what very few filmmakers can ever possibly achieve…exploring cultures that are out of mainstream synthesis, yet are crucial to the understanding of life in areas that one can only read about in books and news articles.

This stems, I believe, from his interest in life. (Mr. Engel, prior to his becoming a film/TV director/writer had inner feelings of becoming a biologist - one who studies life.) Through his projects to date, I readily experienced his “take” on life through my VCR…Starting in 1992 with the documentary film SWITZERLAND ZURICH NOVEMBER on heroin abuse in the streets of Zurich, moving to COP-FOR-HIRE (1993 - the extermination of Street Children in Brazil by the police), HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD - THE HISTORY (1993, the history of Hollywood Boulevard from a plot of land to its present state), ALMOST MONEY MIRACLE (1994, the story of a child that undergoes a traumatizing experience), MILAGRE (1995, a miracle in Rio de Janeiro) through XINGU - LAND OF NO SHAME (1997, native Brazilian Indians of the lower Amazon Region), I experienced worlds that I only read about and regularly wonder “Do they really exist and if so, what is it like?”.

Mr. Engel, a true storyteller at heart, began his sojourn at Northeastern University, studying Marine Biology and through numerous other extra-curricular activities (including the importing of hand-crafted Brazilian items) made the transition between biologist-to-be and storyteller and then, subsequently, (after completing a rigorous Bachelor’s of Science degree) moved to Los Angeles to explore life - on film, as well as to attend UCLA.

As our luncheon progressed, I was to learn many wonderful things, which, despite my editors, I wish to expound here, verbatim.

...” when my grandparents would come to visit my family in Brazil, I was delighted to sit for hours with my grandfather and record on a big tape recorder the stories he had to tell…Countless hours I taped, unknowingly from the rest of the family. Only he could tell so graciously and vividly the tales of horror from the two great wars… He could tell beautiful stories also… Simple and naïve stories about our family, and how hard the few that escaped the Holocaust fought to remain alive… He told me of Ellis Island…I remember looking at his nose resting peacefully on a grayish mustache… It was a big and gentle nose and its skin was full of little holes that I did not have on my nose…I wondered if I would tell stories like that, when I grew holes in my nose…He had a sweet smell also, one that I could recognize anytime…A couple of years later, after he had died in California, I gave those tapes to my dad…I have never seen my father cry, but he told me he did when he heard those tapes. It made me very curious to see how powerful that transition was cemented by the tapes…I felt I had resuscitated something that I could give as a gift, that otherwise might have been lost forever…It was a feeling of transcending the boundaries of life.”…

As our luncheon meeting came to a close, I sat back, and said to myself “I wonder where his future lies…film?…Television?…books?…”

With powerful words, images and visions that transcend all current forms of expression, I cannot, still to this day, answer myself that question, except for “All of the above.”

January 1998
Ashleigh Stratton, writer/journalist
Locust Valley, Long Island, NY

Resume can be found here.