Terry Gross

Eitan Gorlin's latest film, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Best Feature Film prize at the 2002 Slamdance Film Festival. It's a love story, loosely based on his novella Mike's Place, A Jerusalem Diary, and his experiences as a bartender at Mike's Place, a popular bar on the Tel Aviv waterfront where Jews, Muslims, internationals, atheists and devouts congregate. Since the making of the film, Mike's Place was the site of a suicide bombing.

Filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are the team behind American Splendor, which is a hybrid of fiction and documentary. Their previous documentaries are Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's and The Young and the Dead.

Underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner. In 1976 Pekar published the first in a series of comic books about his mundane life as a veterans hospital clerk and record collector in Cleveland. It was called American Splendor, and he has continued to publish them since. In 1987 one of them earned him an American Book Award. Now he is the subject of the new film American Splendor which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.