Ronald Mann (born June 13, 1958), credited professionally as Ron Mann, is a Canadian documentary film director. His work includes the films Imagine the Sound (1981); Comic Book Confidential (1988); Grass (1999) and Go Further (2003), both of which feature Woody Harrelson; In the Wake of the Flood (2010), which features author Margaret Atwood; and Altman (2014), about the life and career of film director Robert Altman. Mann has served as mentor to and worked with many filmmakers from the Toronto New Wave of the 1980s, including Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Jeremy Podeswa, and Peter Mettler. Career 1970s–1980s A graduate of the University of Toronto, Mann began making films at a young age, creating Super 8mm films in the 1970s. Mann began making short films while in high school and studied briefly at Vermont's Bennington College before receiving a B.A. in film from the University of Toronto. His 1973 student film, The Strip, documented the historic Yonge Street strip. Mann did not attend film school; instead, he learned filmmaking first-hand and using his own funds. In an interview with Now, he described this process: Every film was my last movie, I would go into debt, make another film to get myself out of debt. That's how I actually needed to keep going.Mann made his first feature, Imagine the Sound, in his early twenties. The film, released in 1981, deals with the once-controversial genre of free jazz. Critic and film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has said that Imagine the Sound "may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have." In 1984, he made his only fiction film, Listen to the City. Mann has also made numerous short films, including Echoes Without Saying (1983), about the publishing and printing company Coach House Press and its founder Stan Bevington, and Marcia Resnick's Bad Boys (1985), about the New York based photographer. Mann found success with his 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential. The film is a survey of the history of the comic book medium in the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s, as an art form and in social context. Confidential was first released theatrically in Canada in 1988, and in the United States on April 27, 1989. The film received the 1989 Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. Caryn James of The New York Times found the film deft and