Ian Olds is an American film director. His directing credits include the documentary Occupation: Dreamland , which follows the 1/505 company of the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah, Iraq in early 2004 during the Iraq War. Olds also created the documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi , which depicts the working relationship between American journalist Christian Parenti and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi during the War in Afghanistan.
Occupation: Dreamland won a 2006 Independent Spirit Award. [1] Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi earned Olds the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival [2] and won Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 2009 Madrid International Documentary Film Festival. The film was nominated for a 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. [3] HBO Documentaries acquired rights to the film. [4]
In 2012 Olds and actor James Franco co-directed the film Francophrenia: (or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), which repurposes footage taken of Franco on the set of the American soap opera General Hospital. [5]
Olds has also directed several short narrative films that were screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
Olds edited Franco’s split-screen feature adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying , which premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. [6]
Olds was awarded a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, [7] a 2011 San Francisco Film Society/Hearst Screenwriting Grant, [8] and a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. [9]
Olds received his MFA from Columbia University’s Film Division in 2006. He was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2009 [10] and was a 2011 Fellow at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab. [11]
Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist, academic, and author.
Jeffrey Leib Nettler Zimbalist is an American filmmaker. He has been Academy Award shortlisted, has won a Peabody, a DuPont, 5 Emmy Awards with 17 Emmy nominations. He is the owner of film and television production company All Rise Films.
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Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..
Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi is a documentary by Ian Olds that shows the kidnapping of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his interpreter Ajmal Naqshbandi and the events leading to the release of the former and the murder of the latter by the Taliban.
Charles Olivier is an American film and television writer, producer, playwright, journalist and editor. His work has won several Emmys, a G. Foster Peabody award, a Thurgood Marshall Humanitarian Award for Excellence in Journalism, as well as many other accolades. He and his films have taken top awards or been nominated at the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and many more.
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Chris Moukarbel is a film director, writer, producer, contemporary artist and runs the award winning production company Permanent Wave Productions. His first feature documentary Me at the Zoo premiered in competition at Sundance Film Festival in 2012 and was acquired by HBO Documentaries. The film charts the rise of YouTube and tells the story of an early viral Internet celebrity, Chris Crocker of “Leave Britney Alone!” fame. Moukarbel was approached by Sheila Nevins to direct the Emmy nominated documentary Banksy Does New York for HBO.
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Nikyatu Jusu is an American independent writer, director, producer, editor and assistant professor in film and video at George Mason University. Jusu's works center on the complexities of Black female characters and in particular, displaced, immigrant women in the United States. Her work includes African Booty Scratcher (2007), Flowers (2015), Suicide By Sunlight (2019), and Nanny, which received the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. She has endorsed the use of Generative artificial intelligence in filmmaking and uses the technology in her work.
Aaron I. Butler is an American film and television editor and producer.
Dyana Winkler is an American director, producer and writer. She was named one of Variety's 2018 top 10 documentary filmmakers and is best known for her work on the documentary film United Skates.
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