I ran into a friend and OTBKB reader at PS 321’s Winter Carnival who appreciated the post in OTBKB about Park Slope’s Cynthia Wade, the documentary filmmaker, who won an Oscar for “Freeheld” at this year’s Oscar’s.

My friend, Mary Engel, is a documentary filmmaker herself. The daughter of legendary photographer Ruth Orkin, she produced and directed the film, Frames of Life, about her mother.

She just completed a film about her father, Morris Engel, who directed the groundbreaking film, Little Fugitive, about a boy who gets lost in Coney Island in a style that is said to have inspired Francois Truffaut and many others.

Between neorealism and the nouvelle vague stand Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, whose independent feature Little Fugitive (1953) has been credited — by Francois Truffaut, who ought to know — with providing both spiritual imprimatur and nuts-and-bolts strategies for the French New Wave