Director/Producer/Choreographer : Vera Wagman has directed short films including Interlude (Hypnotic Films/Sundance Channel; Montreal, Boston, Dances with Films and Clermont-Ferrand Film Festivals), High Noon (PBS’ “Are We On”) and Jeopardy, a documentary short about an at-risk youth program in Los Angeles where the students train as boxers and dancers. Vera started her career as a dancer with company credits including David Storey/NY and Pennsylvania Dance Theatre where she worked with such innovative choreographers as Ohad Naharin, Creach/Koester and Nina Weiner. She has produced arts events for Santa Monica's Cultural Affairs Division and choreographed MARCH, an original play produced by the LGBT Center and Playwright's Arena in Los Angeles. She recently performed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company as a community dancer in, What Problem? at UCLA Royce Hall.
Executive Producer: Russell Rothberg is an Executive Producer for the Paramount+ series The Offer, was Co-Executive Producer on Apple TV's Foundation, and Co-Executive Producer on History Channel's Knightfall. He directed and produced his first comedy short, Happy Happy Bang Bang, which screened at the 2018 Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival. As Executive VP of Drama Development at Universal Television, Russell developed several series including Bates Motel, The Path, Chicago Fire, Shades of Blue and Emerald City. He also served as VP of Current Programming for Fox Broadcasting Company where he oversaw 24, House, Bones, American Dad and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Russell started his career as an actor-writer-director with an original play, Life After Death, at the Intar Theatre in NYC.
Executive Producer: Roberta Grossman is an award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice. She is the writer, producer, director of Who Will Write Our History, co-produced by Arte and NDR. In 2018, Roberta co-directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Seeing Allred which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. She directed Above and Beyond (2014), about the American–Jewish WWII pilots who volunteered to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. Roberta also produced the NEH supported Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning, which aired on PBS/American Masters. Her 2008 film, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, was shortlisted for an Academy Award and nominated for a Primetime Emmy.
Executive Producer: Andrew Carlberg is an Academy Award-winning film, television, new media, Broadway and Los Angeles stage producer, who was named by Variety as one of “Hollywood’s New Leaders”. Recent credits include the feature Peace in the Valley (2022 Deauville, Tribeca), the romantic comedy Sister of the Groom (Saban Films), the feature film adaptation of his short film The Blazing World (2021 Sundance Film Festival), and HBOMax' The Fallout (2021 SXSW Film Festival, Grand Jury and Audience Award). He produced Anna (72nd Cannes Film Festival) and the Academy Award-nominated Feeling Through. He also produced Skin, winner of the Live Action Short Film category at the 2019 Academy Awards. Andrew is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Producer’s Guild of America and an alum of Film Independent's Fast Track Producing Fellowship and New York's Independent Filmmaker Project.
Executive Producer: Jon Imparato For the last 24 years, Jon has served as the Artistic Director of the Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Theatre at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. He is a recipient of the LA Stage Alliance's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for Excellence in Theatre. Logically Affirmative, a monologue for the Pacific Dance Ensemble, was Jon’s first foray into writing. Jon is currently working on a collection of personal memoir essays, The Good Inside the Grief . His essay, “You Had Me at Afghanistan”, was published in the Wrath-Tree Burning, a literary journal focused on lives impacted by social violence.
Director of Photography: Scott Whitham directed Burden of Memory, a documentary about a 97 year-old B-17 pilot and the remarkable life he lived. He also directed an award-winning short documentary about Zion Harvey, a young boy who received the worlds first pediatric dual hand transplant. Plans are underway to expand the project into a feature length film. Scott has spent the last 29 years working with a wide range of clients in the commercial industry and has also created short form programming for National Geographic, A&E Network, AT&T and Comcast.
Editor: Esther Shubinski's sensitivity and approach to storytelling are shaped by her French and Native American background. She has been nominated for a 2021 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Edited Sports Series for the YouTube Originals series, Defying Gravity: The Untold Story of Women’s Gymnastics, directed by two time Oscar-nominee, Lucy Walker. Sundays, a feature documentary which Esther edited, premiered in competition at the 2020 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Her personal documentary, Out of Love, a festival favorite, premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival to critical acclaim. She also edited The Art of Observing Life, a documentary by her mentor and veteran Russian filmmaker, Marina Goldovskaya, which premiered at IDFA. Esther received her BA from UC Berkeley and holds an MFA in Film Production & Directing at UCLA, where she has taught Documentary Production.
Composer: Joy Ngiaw is a Chinese-Malaysian film and tv composer whose recent projects include the award-winning Apple/Skydance animated, Blush, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and for which she won the 2021 Hollywood Music in Media award for Best Score. She also composed Walt Disney Animation Studios' Jing Hua; VR-animated A Kite's Tale and Netflix' Rescued By Baby. Her score for Fish Head was awarded Best Original Score at the 2020 Asians On Film Festival. She has contributed to a wide variety of critically acclaimed works including Legion (FX), Cobra Kai (Netflix), The Night Of (HBO), and Impractical Jokers: The Movie (WarnerMedia). Joy's concert music has been performed by prestigious orchestras such as Boston Pops and Helix Collective. Nominated for the prestigious Emerging Talent award by the Society of Composers and Lyricists, Joy is a distinguished voice among a new generation of film composers.
French Historian/Project Advisor: Laure Guilbert holds a Ph.D from the European University Institute of Florence and is the author of Danser avec le IIIe Reich: Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2000, André Versaille Editeur, 2011). From 2002 to 2018, she was the Chief Editor for dance books of the Paris National Opera. In 2015 and 2016, Laure was a Marie Curie Visiting Fellow at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (Axel Springer Endowed Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Exile and Migration), and at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin (Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences). She is researching her second book on the exile of the German-speaking choreographic world under Nazism – a project that has led her to many archives in Europe and Australia. Laure was recently a Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as a Fellow at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. She continues her research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Cast: Fernande Wagman was born in Paris, France in 1932. She spent nearly 5 years of her childhood hidden by French Christians in the Savoie, the Free Zone of then Nazi-Occupied France. After obtaining a law degree in Paris, she immigrated to the United States in 1958 where she received a graduate degree in education. She was the Chair of the French department at The Academy of the Holy Angels in New Jersey until 1997. Fernande wrote, Faisons Des Affairs, a textbook for French for business which was used in American high schools and universities. She also wrote her memoir, The Demarcation Line , which is currently in its second edition. In 1995, the government of France named Fernande a Chevalier dans L'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. Fernande passed away on May 17, 2022, with her loving family by her bedside.
Cast: Deborah Wagman is a former professional ballet dancer with American Ballet Theatre II and Ballet West. After leaving the ballet world, she ventured into the world of Latin Ballroom dancing where she studied with ballroom champion, Matt Hauer. For the last 21 years, Deborah has been teaching the Pilates Method to people of all ages and is certified in bodyART™, a strength and movement training workout. Teaching Ballet and Pilates to dancers has been a most meaningful way of connecting with her students and relaying her deep knowledge of dance and movement to the next generation of artists. Deborah is the proud mother of her two sons, Ari and Daniel.