Max Asaf
he/him
Max Asaf
Available for Hire
Open to Mentoring
Affiliations
Kartemquin FilmsBio
Max Asaf is a Chicago-based, award-winning freelance documentary filmmaker. From 2016-2019, Max worked at Kartemquin Films, helping raise over $5 million for the organization and its documentaries. Max produced the 2024 IDA shortlisted documentary short Bad Hostage which reveals the pernicious origins of Stockholm Syndrome. Bad Hostage premiered at the 2024 Sheffield DocFest and won a special jury award at the BendFilm Festival. Max is the co-producer of The Last Strike, an upcoming feature documentary from Kindling Group on the 1981 PATCO strike, and was the producer of The Last Drop, a short sci-fi fiction film exploring the overlooked signs of relationship abuse. Max is also in early post-production on his feature directorial debut, Within the Box, a personal documentary about the memories, stories, and familial identity contained and lost in a box of photos smuggled out of Poland eight decades ago.
Projects
Bad Hostage
After being held hostage, the filmmaker’s grandmother shocked her small town by declaring she felt more threatened by the police than by her captors—a sentiment shared by other women that year. This investigation into the roots of Stockholm Syndrome intertwines a thrilling piece of family lore with the infamous kidnapping of Patty Hearst and a dramatic Swedish bank heist.
The Last Strike
The true story of the '81 PATCO strike when Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 Air Traffic Controllers, changing the American workplace forever
Within the Box
Eight decades after being smuggled out of Poland, a box of photographs sparks a filmmaker’s journey to confront his family’s past and the haunted silence that lingers in their present.
Confronting the pervasiveness of intergenerational trauma, cultural taboos around mental illness, and the ever expanding shadow of the Holocaust, Within the Box explores how a family and its identity can persist by holding onto the repressed and fragmented stories of the past and telling new and joyous ones of the future.
The Last Drop
A young woman links minds with her boyfriend, using a device that lets couples relive shared memories— but when she spots overlooked signs of abuse, she must escape before he can manipulate her memories in his favor.