Ms. Buirski devoted her skilled life to documenting the world on movie, each in nonetheless images and in shifting photos. After starting her profession as an editor at Magnum, the extremely regarded picture cooperative, she grew to become an image editor at the New York Times and later based the Full Frame (*78*) Film Festival in Durham, N.C., in 1998.

Ms. Buirski established her personal popularity as a filmmaker with the discharge in 2011 of “The Loving Story,” a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple at the middle of the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that invalidated state anti-miscegenation legal guidelines.

The movie, which aired on HBO, obtained Peabody and Emmy awards and helped encourage the 2016 characteristic movie “Loving” starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. Ms. Buirski was amongst that movie’s producers.

The Loving Legacy: Five interracial couples tell their love stories in a state where it was once a crime for Mildred and Richard Loving to marry

In her documentary, she referred to as upon intensive archival materials to assemble a deeply private portrait of Richard Loving, who was White, and Mildred Loving, who was half African American and half Native American.

“In a rich collection of 16-millimeter film, old news clips and still photographs, the Lovings don’t look like two people caught up in a cause, they seem like two people caught up in each other,” TV critic Alessandra Stanley wrote in the Times.

Ms. Buirski returned to civil rights historical past in later documentaries together with “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), about an African American lady who was gang-raped by a bunch of White assailants in Alabama in 1944 and, with assist from activists together with Rosa Parks, challenged the mores of the Jim Crow South by searching for justice in her case.

Ms. Buirski’s 2020 documentary “A Crime on the Bayou” resurrected a 1966 case that originated in Louisiana amid the desegregation of public colleges. Gary Duncan, an African American man, witnessed what he believed to be an impending struggle between some White college students and his two younger family members. He intervened by doing nothing greater than touching the arm of one of many White boys, he stated, however was charged with battery in a case that finally went to the Supreme Court.

Ms. Buirski delved into the cultural historical past of the United States in movies together with “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), about Tanaquil Le Clercq, the majestically proficient American ballerina who was paralyzed by polio in 1956, and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), in regards to the celebrated director of movies together with “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.”

Ms. Buirski interviewed Lumet for the documentary earlier than his death in 2011. Both the Le Clercq and Lumet movies have been offered on the PBS sequence “American Masters.”

Ms. Buirski’s most up-to-date movie was “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2022), about “Midnight Cowboy,” the 1969 Academy Award-winning drama directed by John Schlesinger and starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman that grew to become a cultural touchstone of the period.

“She’s telling you about the making of the movie, but she’s using it as a way into a much bigger set of themes — politics, culture, homophobia,” Glenn Frankel, a former Washington Post reporter and the writer of the e-book “Shooting ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” stated in an interview about Ms. Buirski’s work.

For her half, she stated she noticed “Midnight Cowboy” as an illustration of the ability of movie.

“One of the reasons I made the movie is I wanted to excavate why people were so touched by it back in the day and continue to be,” Ms. Buirski advised the Desert Sun of Palm Springs, Calif., earlier this yr. What she tried to carry to the documentary, she continued, “was the sense that films that have lasting power are not made in a vacuum. What was it that surrounded that film? What happened in that era that made that film inevitable? What kind of impact did it have on the next era?”

Nancy Florence Cohen — she was certainly one of three daughters, together with a twin sister — was born in Manhattan on June 24, 1945. Her father was a paper producer, and her mom labored in numerous jobs in inside design.

Ms. Buirski grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and was a 1967 graduate of Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. After her time with Magnum, she spent greater than a decade at the Times, together with as an image editor on the worldwide desk.

In an obituary, the Times credited Ms. Buirski with choosing for publication the picture that obtained the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in characteristic images. Shot by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter amid famine in Sudan, the image, which ricocheted world wide, confirmed a ravenous lady collapsed on the bottom en path to a meals distribution heart as a vulture eyed her menacingly.

Such was the response to the {photograph}, the Times reported, that the newspaper subsequently printed an editors’ observe explaining that after the picture was taken, the lady resumed her stroll to the meals heart. The photographer, who shortly thereafter died by suicide, scared away the vulture.

In her personal images work, Ms. Buirski revealed the 1994 quantity “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America,” a set of photos {that a} Times reviewer positioned within the custom of Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange.

Ms. Buirski led the Full Frame (*78*) Film Festival till 2008. Hoping to direct a movie of her personal, she settled on the topic for her first work when she learn Mildred Loving’s obituary that yr within the Times.

“They may have been reluctant heroes and they may have been unsung heroes,” Ms. Buirski told The Washington Post of the Lovings, “but they are heroes nonetheless.”

Ms. Buirski’s marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein resulted in divorce. Her sister Judith is her solely rapid survivor.

“My films are about justice,” Ms. Buirski as soon as told the New York Observer, reflecting on the themes that ran by means of her work. “My films are also about empathy,” she continued. “We come to understand other people’s lives even as we gain a deeper understanding about ourselves.”