James Francis Cameron is a Canadian filmmaker. A major figure in the post-New Hollywood era, Cameron is considered one of the industry's most innovative filmmakers, regularly making use of novel technologies. He first gained recognition for writing and directing The Terminator (1984) and found further success with Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and the action comedy True Lies (1994). He wrote and directed Titanic (1997), Avatar (2009) and its sequels, with Titanic earning him Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing. A recipient of various other industry accolades, two of his films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American and Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. Scorsese emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. He is the recipient of many major accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Directors Guild of America Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Robert Joseph Flaherty, was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran (1934), filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands. Flaherty is considered the father of both the documentary and the ethnographic film.
Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967), and Goodbye to Language (2014).
Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is best known for making original films with contemporary supernatural plots and twist endings. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3.4 billion globally.
Robert Greenwald is an American filmmaker, and the founder of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film and advocacy organization whose work is distributed for free in concert with nonprofit partners and movements in order to educate and mobilize for progressive causes. With Brave New Films, Greenwald has made investigative documentaries such as Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004), Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), Rethink Afghanistan (2009), Koch Brothers Exposed (2012), and War on Whistleblowers (2013), Suppressed 2020: The Fight to Vote (2020), Suppressed and Sabotaged: The Fight to Vote (2022), Beyond Bars: A Son's Fight for Justice (2022) as well as many short investigative films and internet videos.
My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of life, and contrasts Andre's spiritual experiences with Wally's modest humanism.
Steve James is an American film producer and director of several documentaries, including Hoop Dreams (1994), Stevie (2002), The Interrupters (2011), Life Itself (2014), and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016).
Philip Alexander Gibney is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time."
P. David Ebersole is an American independent filmmaker, television director, and novelist. He began his film career as a child actor, playing the lead in the musical Junior High School (1978), which also starred Paula Abdul.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Todd Hughes is an American screenwriter, author, producer and film director. He is a Columbia University graduate and currently resides in Palm Springs, California and Mérida, Yucatán.
Not My Life is a 2011 American independent documentary film about human trafficking and contemporary slavery. The film was written, produced, and directed by Robert Bilheimer, who had been asked to make the film by Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Bilheimer planned Not My Life as the second installment in a trilogy, the first being A Closer Walk and the third being the unproduced Take Me Home. The title Not My Life came from a June 2009 interview with Molly Melching, founder of Tostan, who said that many people deny the reality of contemporary slavery because it is an uncomfortable truth, saying, "No, this is not my life."
Paul Radu is an investigative journalist based in Bucharest, Romania. He is the director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, for which he and cofounder Drew Sullivan received the Special Award by the European Press Prize. He is also one of the cofounders of the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism. He investigates transnational crime in Eastern Europe. He has received multiple international awards for his journalism. He believes that journalists should not be activists, but should rather trust that objective journalism is a sufficient contribution to whatever causes one might otherwise advocate. He teaches at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Summer School of Investigative Reporting. In 2008, he sat on a Central European Initiative jury to name that year's best investigative journalist; the jury chose Drago Hedl. In 2009, he appeared on 48 Hours investigating sexual slavery and human trafficking in Romania. He has also investigated human trafficking in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I'm Still Here: The Truth About Schizophrenia is a documentary film about schizophrenia. This 65-minute, black-and-white film was written and directed by Robert Bilheimer. Bilheimer began working on the film soon after being nominated for an Academy Award for the film The Cry of Reason: Beyers Naude – An Afrikaner Speaks Out. Psychiatrist Stephen Mark Goldfinger cowrote the film.
Richard Young was a cinematographer and film director who was born in Penfield, New York, United States.
Eugenia Bonetti is a nun who works to rescue girls from being trafficked in Italy and help women leave the country's prostitution industry.
Operation Stormy Nights was an early major anti-human-trafficking operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Operations took place in Oklahoma and brought to light organized crime networks trafficking female minors along United States Numbered Highways, where the girls were forced into prostitution to service truck drivers.
Sheila White is an African-American anti–sex trafficking activist, and a former human trafficking victim herself, from The Bronx, New York City.
Gary Don Rhodes is an American writer, filmmaker, and film historian. His work includes research on early 20th century films and key figures such as filmmakers and actors involved in the process. He is best known for his contribution to classic horror films and his biographies on Bela Lugosi. Rhodes has also contributed to the filmmaking process with both documentaries and mockumentaries. He is a tenured faculty member in film studies at Queen's University Belfast.
