Jeffrey Tuchman, 62, Dies; Directed Clinton ‘Man From Hope’ Film

An appraisal of the film in The New York Times concluded that Mr. Clinton “communicated a recurrent subliminal message: Here is a man who has nothing to hide, who can look Americans straight in the eye and bare his soul.”

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Jeffrey Steven Tuchman was born on June 17, 1955, in Manhattan to Holocaust survivors who met at a displaced persons camp after both had survived Nazi concentration camps.

His father, Dr. Marcel Tuchman is a diagnostician at NYU Langone Health, the medical center associated with New York University, where he was also a professor of medicine. His mother, the former Shoshana Itzkovich, managed Dr. Tuchman’s office.

Jeffrey attended Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan, the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the Concord School in Hersfordshire, England. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where his fellow student documentarians included Ken Burns.

While working for Public Agenda, a nonprofit public policy group founded by the polling researcher Daniel Yankelovich and Cyrus R. Vance, a future secretary of state, Mr. Tuchman met the political consultant Mandy Grunwald. She recommended him to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the United States Senate from New York in 2000 and for re-election in 2006, and for president in 2008 and 2016.

“He was an extraordinary storyteller because he always found the heart in every story,” Ms. Grunwald said in an email. “ ‘The Man from Hope’ is still the best candidate film ever made.

“The earliest political ad makers were all documentary filmmakers,” she continued. “Later, political operatives of one kind or another started making ads, because it was lucrative. But Jeffrey brought the intimate visual and storytelling skills of the documentary film world into politics.”

Mr. Tuchman produced documentary films in California on poverty, health, immigration and gay parenthood and taught filmmaking at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

In addition to his brother, Mr. Tuchman is survived by his companion, Jackie Tepper, and his father, who continues to work as an internist in Manhattan. His mother died in 2013.

When Mr. Tuchman died, he was working on a documentary about his father, now 95. Dr. Tuchman survived imprisonment at Auschwitz, worked as a slave laborer for the German industrial conglomerate Siemens (then Siemens-Schucker) and returned to Germany to testify at a war-crimes trial against the Nazi who had murdered his mother.

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