J. Michael Seyfert

J. Michael Seyfert (born 1959) is a German Mexican documentary film director best known for the documentaries Rent a Rasta and Bye Bye Havana. Among other awards, at the Atlanta International Documentary Film Festival, Seyfert was awarded Best Post-Production forBye Bye Havana in 2006, and Best Director for Rent a Rasta in 2007.

Seyfert began his professional life 1977 as music industry writer and photographer with Fachblatt Musikmagazin [de], a Cologne, Germany based monthly for which he subsequently worked as Los Angeles bureau chief.

In 1992 Seyfert relocated to New York City to work as interactive media content producer and internet entrepreneur. As Creative Director Seyfert took major brands such as Steve Madden (company), Le Cordon Bleuand RE/MAX of New York online.

During the early days of costly dial up internet access Seyfert developed and trademarked a "Free Internet" model wherein an advertiser driven portal would absorb the user's cost of dial up service.This model was later adapted and its trademark acquired by Freei Networksfamous for its Baby Bob commercial.FreeiNet eventually transferred its assets to NetZero.

In early 2000 the U.S. Federal Reserve increased interest rates six times and the economy began to lose speed, also resulting in the burst of the Internet bubble.

Seyfert relocated to a rustic Baja desert village applying his acquired internet related skills to practice his own brand of freedom as geography was no longer an inextricable element of the workplace.

From 1995 and until 2007 Seyfert developed the high traffic portal Baja.com the sale of which he would use to finance an off-grid documentary film production company focusing on Latin America.

In 2002 Seyfert's vision for a cartel-free filmmaking enterprise began to take shape while exploring Latin America's inequities through the eyes of its dispossessed people: Widows of the Guatemalan ethnocide known as The Silent Holocaust near Rabinal, site of some of the bloodiest massacres in Guatemala's Civil War, coca farmers and abandoned Tungsten mine workers in the Bolivian Andes, an Amazon tribe being driven from the rain forest by loggers and oil companies, dreadlocked Jamaican descendants of slaves selling sex to middle aged women and the reclusive Rastafarian Mansion Bobo Ashanti of Bull Bay appeal for repatriation to Africa, recicladores dwelling on a 150-hectare Mexico City mega garbage dump and resilient Cubans in their daily struggle to survive in the ruins of Central Havana, 10-year-old street children living among deported American Mara Salvatrucha gang members in a devastated El Salvador and heavily armed Brazilian favela gangsters in their quest for humanity. Seyfert's films are entirely self-funded and produced with rudimentary tools and have remained relevant long after they were made. They are the subject of citation in academic articles and dissertations.

Portland State University "Issues of Authenticity in Small Scale Tourism: A Study of the McDisney Experience".

"The Rastafarian Movement in Jamaica" Masaryk University, Czech Republic.

From 1996 to 2005 Seyfert worked with British rock musician Roger Bunn, first guitarist of Roxy Music as American editor of MIHRA, The Music Industry Human Rights Organization based in London. In 2003 Bunn was narrator of Bye Bye Havana as well as contributor to the film's soundtrack from his posthumously released album Piece of Mind.

In 2003 Paul Cooke, founding member and drummer of the British smooth jazz rock band SADE collaborated with Seyfert on several projects including the soundtrack of Bye Bye Havana.

In 2008 Bolivian cinematographer and Smithsonian Bicentennial Medal recipient Jorge Ruiz contributed to Seyfert's film Opposite Land historic footage taken on Lake Titikaka in 1950 to juxtapose Seyfert's contemporary footage of Titino floating island and reveal 50 years of stagnation.