General Fazil Ahmad Sayar
General Fazil Ahmad Sayar was the Chief of Staff and Brigadier General of the 207th Corps in Herat, Afghanistan. He entered the Afghan military at age 13, serving a total of 27 years. Sayar is a combat proven soldier. He is a two-star ranking general, educated at a military university, who previously commanded all Special Forces in Kabul. In addition to his extensive experience working with Afghan forces, he has worked with Russian Military Advisors in the 1980’s and more recently, the Italian Operational Mentor and Liaison Team (OMLT).Sayar was born in the province of Parwan, and is of Tajik descent.
Colonel (R) Michael Shute
Michael Shute is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and former Senior Staff Officer of the New Jersey National Guard. From February 2006 to June 2007, he served as the deputy commander and commander of the 207th Regional Security Advisory Command in Herat, Afghanistan. As the senior U.S. military officer responsible for the Western Afghanistan Area of Operations, he managed hundreds of personnel responsible for training one brigade of Afghan National Army soldiers. During his tour, he was awarded the Italian Commemorative Service Cross, the Spanish Meritorious Service Medal and Combat Action Badge.
Throughout his 31 years of military service, Col. (Ret) Shute worked extensively in the areas of Homeland Security operations, personnel management, project management, organizational mapping, and foreign military advising and training. Col. (Ret) Shute is now retired from service and resides in Salem, New Jersey with his wife of 29 years, Linda (Copeland) Shute. They have two sons and a daughter-in-law; Jeremy, James and Lorren.
Director, Carol Dysinger
Carol Dysinger has been a feature film and documentary editor for the past 25 years. Her editing credits include: the Emmy-nominated documentary film, Deadline (Sundance Film Festival; NBC 2004); Rain (Sundance Film Festival; Venice Film Festival); the Emmy-nominated documentary film, Punk; and Santitos (Sundance Film Festival).
Carol has served as a consultant for a variety of documentary films, feature films, and music videos. She also had a career as a screenwriter with scripts produced for 20th Century Fox, Disney, and HBO. Carol is a tenured Professor of Graduate Film and New Media at NYU Film School in the Tisch School of the Arts.
Producer, Kusama Hinte
Jeff Levy-Hinte, president of Antidote Films in New York City, has recently completed several documentaries, including Soul Power, produced and directed by Levy-Hinte, and Dungeon Masters, directed by Kevin McAlester. Both Films premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.
Levy-Hinte also produced the documentary film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, directed by Marina Zenovich. Winner of the Documentary Editing Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the film was released domestically by HBO and THINK Films, and internationally through The Weinstein Company and the BBC. Additional producing credits include: The Hawk is Dying (Sundance Film Festival, Cannes, 2006), The Last Winter, Mysterious Skin (Venice Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, 2004, Thirteen (Sundance Film Festival, 2003) and Laurel Canyon. Levy-Hinte edited the 1996 Academy Award-winning documentary, When We Were Kings; and he is also the Board Chair for the Independent Feature Project (IFP) of New York. He is currently preparing to produce The Kids Are All Right, written and to be directed by Lisa Cholodenko.
Producer, Dallas Brennan Rexer
Dallas Brennan Rexer has been producing social-issue documentaries since 1998.
Dallas produced Christy Turlington Burns’ No Woman, No Cry (Tribeca Film Festival, 2010), a feature documentary on maternal health, filmed in Bangladesh, Tanzania, Guatemala, and the USA. As the Senior Producer at Big Mouth Productions/Arts Engine, she produced five award-winning documentary films: the Emmy-nominated Deadline (Sundance Film Festival, 2004 and broadcast as an NBC primetime special), about Governor Ryan of Illinois and his historic decision to commute all the state’s death sentences; Arctic Son (Full Frame Film Festival, 2006 and POV) about an estranged father and son who are reunited in a remote Arctic village; and Election Day (SXSW Film Festival, 2007 and POV), a day-in-the-life of election day 2004 in America. She also Co-Produced Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America (ITVS) and Journey to the West: Chinese Medicine Today (Wellspring Media).
Dallas has served as a Researcher/Writer for Trilogy Films (Dawn Porter) and Break Thru Films (Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern) and a Production Consultant on Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney’s multimedia documentary The Trials of Spring (Human Rights Watch Film Festival, 2015). She also was a Consulting
Producer on Sandy McLeod’s Seeds of Time (Copenhagen Film Festival, 2013) and Cecily Pingree and Jason Mann’s Betting the Farm (Silverdocs, 2012). She has served as a Line Producer for Thom Zimny/Sony Music’s Bruce Springsteen—The Seeger Sessions documentary.
Dallas is a 1997/98 Fulbright Scholar who conducted research on television and national identity in Trinidad, West Indies. Her reviews have appeared in American Anthropologist and the International Institute for the Visual Arts. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College’s Philosophy Department and lives in
Manhattan with her husband and two sons.
Robert Nickelsberg
As a TIME magazine contract photographer, Nickelsberg, was based in New Delhi from 1988 to 2000. During that time, he documented conflicts in Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka, India and Afghanistan. He was one of the few photographers who had first hand exposure to the early days of the rise of fundamentalist groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal areas and al-Qaeda, and his work provides a unique up close view of the Soviet withdrawal, the rise of the Taliban and the invasion by the U.S. Nickelsberg moved to New York in 2000 and continues to travel overseas – reporting on the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 – and focus on chronicling the devastating psychological effects of war in Kashmir.
In 2008, he was awarded grants from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and from the South Asia Journalists Association to document and report on post-traumatic stress disorder in Kashmir after 20 years of insurgency. In 2014, Nickelsberg was awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot award for his book Afghanistan – A Distant War, for the best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines or books.
Editor, Mary Lampson
Mary Lampson is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker and editor. Lampson co edited the Academy Award–wining documentary Harlan County, USA and acted as an editor on many other independently produced documentary features. She has worked with Emile de Antonio, Ricky Leacock, and D.A. Pennebaker.
She also produced and directed Until She Talks. This 40-minute dramatic film was produced independently and then acquired by the PBS series American Playhouse. Lampson has produced more than 25 short live-action films for Sesame Street and teaches filmmaking to children as an artist-in-residence in public schools.
Recent projects include: A Lion In The House (Steven Bognar and Julia Reickert), Rain In Dry Land and We Still Live Here (Anne Makepeace), Trouble The Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal), Kimjonglilia (NC Heikin), Camp Victory, Afganistan (Carol Dysinger), On Coal River (Francine Cavanaugh and Adams Wood), Gurukulam (Jillian Elizabeth), Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield), The Revolutionary Optimists (Nicole Newnham and Maren Monson-Grainger) and This Changes Everything (Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein.)
She has been both a fellow and advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Editing and Story Lab and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Editor, Mary Manhardt
Mary Manhardt is a documentary film editor and consultant based in New York City, specializing in verite. Her work has been shown and honored in festivals all over the world, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Tribeca, SXSW, Full Frame, Hot Docs, AFI, IDFA, Human Rights Watch and Vancouver. Her credits include: The Farm, The Execution of Wanda Jean, Street Fight, Farmingville, American Teen, Girl, Adopted, Racing Dreams, Camp Victory, Afghanistan, American Promise, Medora, Tough Love, The Babushkas of Chernobyl and Tig. She is currently working on a 10 part doc series for Netflix. She lives in the East Village with her son Eyob, 17, and two naughty dogs.