It would be no exaggeration to characterize Margaret Smilow as one of the most successful and powerful women in documentary filmmaking. The works in her filmography are inspired and her role in their creation pivotal: Margaret Smilow is a producer.

Margaret Smilow has been producing films on the subject of international culture and the arts since the beginning of her career. Her specialty is portraits of great artists who have transformed the map of international art. She began working in the documentary field in 1979, when she founded the production company Alternate Current. With this company she produced the multi award winning documentary series Music for the Movies about great composers who transformed the film soundtrack. The first film of the series, Bernard Hermann, about the composer who wrote the music for the films of Hitchcock, was nominated for an Oscar in 1992. Documentaries on Arthur Freed and Busby Berkeley belong to the same series. In 1998 she returned to the masters of film soundtracks with Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note. The portrait of his musical West Side Story was screened on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and won an Emmy for best documentary, an award she won again in 1999 for her documentary on the famous violinist Yitzhak Pearlman.

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