BEVERLY HILLS, CA – FEBRUARY 25th 2008  Alex Gibney walked away with the Academy Award for best documentary feature at the ceremony at the  Kodak Theater in Los Angeles last night.

The award for Taxi to the Dark Side confirms Gibney’s standing as one of the foremost non-fiction film-makers working today.

"Let's hope we can turn this country around," Gibney said on accepting the award. Gibney also served as executive producer on another nominated documentary, "No End in Sight."

Taxi to the Dark Side has already won best documentary honors at both the Tribeca and Chicago International film festivals.

Gibney who is represented by Saville Productions for commercials, was also the writer, producer and director of the 2006 Oscar-nominated film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which also received the Independent Spirit Award and the WGA Award.

Taxi to the Dark Side is a rage-inducing expose of how the US administration came to condone torture in the name of national security. Thoroughly documented and with remarkably candid interviews with the perpetrators of and bureaucrats behind the violence, the documentary raises the question buried beneath the march of wartime headlines: How will the United States be affected by its disastrous abrogation of human rights and rule of law, now and for decades to come?

The film is also a personal project for Gibney, dedicated to his late father, who was a Naval interrogator during World War II and who was outraged by the revelations of torture at U.S. prisons. Says the elder Gibney of his World War II interrogation work, "There was a rule of law. You never forgot that ... It was something we believed. It made America different."

Gibney’s other credits include the theatrical documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger; the HBO documentary, Speak Truth to Power (producer) starring Alec Baldwin, Sigourney Weaver, John Malkovich and Kevin Kline; Sexual Century, (writer, director, series producer); and The Pacific Century (writer/director/producer), a 10-hour documentary series that was honored with an Emmy, two Emmy nominations and the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.

In 2003, Gibney served as the Series Producer for The Blues, an Emmy-nominated series of films in association with executive producer Martin Scorsese.  The directors for The Blues were: Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders. Gibney also produced The Soul of a Man, the film by Wim Wenders for that series (also an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival), and was awarded a Grammy for producing the 5-CD box set based on the series.