Peter Keough's article remembering Karen
/Peter Keough wrote a lovely In Memoriam article in February, 2010:
"Karen Schmeer, 1970-2010"
Karen Schmeer, the brilliant local film editor whose work on Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War helped win it the Best Documentary Oscar in 2004, died January 29 in a tragic accident, struck by a getaway car as she was crossing a street in Manhattan. She would have turned 40 on February 20.
Recognized as one of the best editors in documentary filmmaking, Schmeer also worked with several other filmmakers, including local directors Lucia Small on her My Father, the Genius (2002) and Robb Moss on his The Same River Twice (2003), as well as the late Hollywood legend Sydney Pollack on his Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005). Last year, she won the Sundance Film Festival's Documentary Film Editing Award for Greg Barker's Sergio.
Commenting on her death at this past weekend's Sundance Festival Awards Ceremony, Barker said, "I had the incredible honor of accepting this very award and standing here a year ago for the amazing work that Karen did on Sergio. . . . We look for meaning in tragedy, you just don't know what the meaning is. All of us, this community here — and it is a community — have lost a very great talent and a very dear friend."