Rory Kennedy has experienced an astounding amount of tragedy in her life. She never met her father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, because he was assassinated six months before she was born. Her brother David passed away from an overdose in 1984 after a long, public battle with substance abuse. Another brother, Robert Jr., and other members of her family have also battled substance abuse while dealing with public scrutiny. Her brother Michael died after a skiing accident in Aspen despite her attempts to resuscitate him with CPR. Two years after that, her cousin John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and his sister-in-law Lauren, were killed in a plane crash.
Despite the amount of trauma she has experienced, Kennedy refuses to be a victim of the “Kennedy Curse.”
“I grew up with family who had a real sense of gratitude for the life we have, and for all the extraordinary gifts. There wasn’t a lot of tolerance for feeling like a victim, or feeling sorry for yourself,” she said in a 2018 interview with The Guardian.
Kennedy has made a name for herself as a documentarian, with acclaimed films including “American Hollow,” “Epidemic Africa,” “America: Up In Arms,” “Last Days of Vietnam,” “The Fence,” and most recently this year’s “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.”
She has been the recipient of the Best Documentary prize at the Woodstock Film Festival for “A Boy’s Life,” earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary (Feature) for “Street Fight,” and directed and co-produced the Emmy Award-nominated series “Pandemic: Facing AIDS.” “American Hollow,” which tells the story of an Appalachian family living in poverty, won for Best Documentary at AFI Fest and the Chicago International Film Festival.
Kennedy is unafraid to explore touchy social issues such as addiction, nuclear radiation, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the politics of the Mexican border fence. In the 1990s, she and fellow Brown University classmate Vanessa Vadim established the non-profit organization MayDay Media, which concentrates on the production and distribution of films with a social conscience.