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Long-time Pryor Cashman client Ellen Kuras has produced and directed her first feature length documentary, The Betrayal, which has been nominated for both the Independent Spirit Award and the Academy Award in the feature-length documentary category. The film reopened in New York on January 30, 2009. 

Kuras is best known as one of the top directors of photography in the country, having done camera work for Martin Scorsese (“Shine a Light”), Neil Young, Spike Lee, Bill Clinton, Jim Brown, and Tom Kalin, among others. 

The Betrayal is about a family forced to flee Laos after the father has collaborated with the CIA, been imprisoned by the new Laotian regime and is presumed murdered. The mother manages to escape in a small boat, in the dead of night across the Mekong River with seven of her children under the age of 12. They are eventually resettled in the United States when the State Department places them in a crack house in Brooklyn where they must share a two bedroom apartment with two other families, one from Vietnam and the other from Cambodia. 

Filmed over a 24-year period by Kuras, the documentary tells the story of how the family has fled violence in their native land only to be confronted by new violence in their new home in New York City. Pryor Cashman has been involved for 17 of the 24 years during which this project has been “in production.”  Pryor Cashman Counsel Barry Landsman, Ralph DePalma and Bob Stein worked on the film, together with Wilder Knight.