Daniel Anker, Maker of Powerful Documentaries, Dies at 50

Daniel Anker, a filmmaker whose sober documentaries brought unsensationalized narrative power to subjects including the trials of the Scottsboro boys and Hollywood’s treatment of the Holocaust, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 50.

The cause was pneumonia brought on by treatment for lymphoma, his wife, Donna Santman, said....

Mr. Anker’s 2000 film, “Scottsboro: An American Tragedy,” narrated by Andre Braugher, was a thorough, event-by-event account of the incident in 1931 in which nine black teenagers riding a freight train in Alabama were falsely accused of rape by two white women, and the multiple trials and international publicity that resulted. The film recounts the myriad strains of a complex tale whose consequences resonated for decades — including a Supreme Court ruling that spurred the integration of juries in the South; the various fates, mostly sad, of the nine men; and, the final irony, the pardoning of the last survivor of the “Scottsboro boys,” Clarence Norris, by George C. Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, in 1976.

The film, which Mr. Anker produced and directed with Barak Goodman and which also featured the voices of Frances McDormand and Stanley Tucci, was shown on public television, received a Primetime Emmy Award and was nominated for an Oscar.

Mr. Anker also produced (with Ellin Baumel) and directed “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust” (2004), which tracks how the movies and television responded to Nazi brutality. Narrated by Gene Hackman, it begins with the film industry’s willingness to accommodate the rise of Hitler in the 1930s for the sake of maintaining a German audience and follows Hollywood’s changes in attitude through the war and in the decades beyond, as the Third Reich came to embody monstrous human behavior....