Ian Olds is an American film director. His directing credits include the documentary Occupation: Dreamland, which follows the 1/505 company of the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah, Iraq in early 2004 during the Iraq War. Olds also created the documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which depicts the working relationship between American journalist Christian Parenti and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi during the War in Afghanistan.
Occupation: Dreamland won a 2006 Independent Spirit Award.[1] Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi earned Olds the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival[2] and won Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 2009 Madrid International Documentary Film Festival. The film was nominated for a 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.[3] HBO Documentaries acquired rights to the film.[4]
In 2012 Olds and actor James Franco co-directed the film Francophrenia: (or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), which repurposes footage taken of Franco on the set of the American soap opera General Hospital.[5]
Olds has also directed several short narrative films that were screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
Olds edited Franco’s split-screen feature adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, which premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.[6]
Olds was awarded a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship,[7] a 2011 San Francisco Film Society/Hearst Screenwriting Grant,[8] and a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.[9]
Olds received his MFA from Columbia University’s Film Division in 2006. He was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2009[10] and was a 2011 Fellow at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab.[11]