Article from MovieCity News by Leonard Klady; photo (2006) from the Los Angeles Times

theOscarSite Bio: When Amy Berg decided to hang out a shingle and produce feature documentaries in 2004, she wasn't quite sure what subject might both consume her interest and hit a nerve with audiences.

Berg, a Los Angeles native, began her career in radio, moved into news at KCBS and segued to a gig producing investagative reports for CNN. She received Emmys for a sports documentary and a social profile set in South Central L.A. In those jobs, she'd also done close to a dozen reports on the sex scandals that wracked California's Catholic dioceses over the past decade. An associate had given Berg a phone number for one Father Oliver O'Grady and she decided to make a blind call to him. A convicted pedophile, he had moved back to Ireland to escape scrutiny. She knew him only from criminal records and imagined him as some sort of monster preying on the vulnerability of children.

If not precisely a profile of O'Grady, her feature documentary DELIVER US FROM EVIL situates him at its center. For good and ill, he is its soul. Berg puts it more simply: "There would be no film without O'Grady."

Berg personally financed a trip to see meet O'Grady. Months later, she made another trip and in eight days shot the interview footage. Armed with that material she proceeded to secure the private financing that allowed her to make the movie. The rest of the film is culled from available news material and extensive interviews with three of O'Grady's victims, their families, and their emotional and legal support teams. DELIVER US FROM EVIL's emotional potency derives largely from putting a human face on decades of looking away from this crisis by the church.

Berg couldn't be more pleased about the audience response during the opening weekend of the festival. She says that she wrestled with bowing the film at the Tribeca fest or in Ireland but the public and industry reaction at LAFF more than validated her decision to premiere the film where the story would have the greatest resonance.

· Achievement in Documentary Features 2006: DELIVER US FROM EVIL (w. Frank Donner)