Jonathan Jakubowicz is Venezuela’s most celebrated filmmaker and writer. His film, Secuestro Express, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the British Independent Film Awards and was a New York Times “Critics’ Pick” in 2005. That same year, Secuestro Express became Venezuela’s highest-grossing film. It became the first Venezuelan movie to be acquired by a Major US Distributor, Miramax. His first film passion was Distance, a poignant short film about a woman’s mysterious past, unfolding during an unexpected trip to Holland in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. The film screened at the  World  Film Festival of Montreal, New York Independent Film Festival, and Palm Springs Short Film Festival, amongst others.

Previous to all this, Jakubowicz treaded sensitive waters gracefully as he broached the subject of September 11 from a very different angle. In addition, Jakubowicz wrote and directed Ships of Hope, a documentary recounting the journey of refugee Jews on a ship fleeing the European Nazi Regime to Venezuela. It screened at the Director’s Guild of America’s Angelus Awards and the Havana Film Festival. The documentary went on to win Best Documentary at the Premios a la Calidad de Cenac (Venezulelan Oscars). It was purchased by HBO and History Channel Latin America.

In 2010 he co-directed the HBO International Show Prófugos, the biggest action-driven original series ever made in Latin America. The series premiered in September 2011 in the US and all Spanish-speaking territories across the world and was nominated for the Monte Carlos TV Festival as Best Series of the Year. His second film, Hands of Stone, about the relationship between Panamanian boxer, Roberto Durán (played by Edgar Ramírez) and his trainer, Ray Arcel (played by Robert De Niro), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and was warmly received with a 15-minute standing ovation. It is the first Latin movie to have a simultaneous wide release in all of Latin America.

In November 2016, Jakubowicz published his first novel, Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard. It immediately became a best-seller in the Spanish language market. In February 2017, it became the number one Amazon Best Seller for all Foreign Language Fiction. In Venezuela, the book sparked unprecedented success, not only in the record-breaking sales but also in the amount of public gatherings to read it. One community of 50,000 people that define themselves as “resistance to the Maduro dictatorship (Resistencia Venezuela hasta los tuétanos)” read the book aloud every night on the encrypted frequency of the app Zello. The book is on its way to become the biggest Best Seller of all time for a Venezuelan author.

His latest film, Resistance, stars Academy Award nominated actors Jesse Eisenberg and Ed Harris, along with Clémence Poésy and Edgar Ramírez. The film was shot at the end of 2018 and tells the story of how a group of Boys and Girls Scouts created a network that ended up saving 10,000 orphans during World War II. One of them went on to become the greatest mime of all time: Marcel Marceau. Jakubowicz is of Polish Jewish descent and has a BA in Communications from the Universidad Central de Venezuela.