Where Heaven Meets Hell

Sasha Friedlander is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Sasha completed her BA from UCLA in 2007, and received her MFA in Social Documentary Film from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2011. After UCLA, Sasha received a Darmasiswa Fellowship to study at the Indonesian Art Institute in Bali. While in Indonesia, Sasha began an internship at Bali TV, and because of her fluency in the Indonesian language, was asked to join a team of journalists from the BBC and the Bali Post to launch the first edition of the International Bali Post. Inspired by a brief trip she took to Kawah Ijen crater in East Java in 2009, she returned to Indonesia a year later, to produce Where Heaven Meets Hell, her first feature documentary film. Where Heaven Meets Hell has won numerous awards including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature Documentary Film and a Special Jury award for Outstanding Cinematography at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and the Halekulani Golden Orchid Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Hawaii International Film Festival. At the One World International Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, the Václav Havel Jury gave a Special Mention Award to the film for being a documentary that has made an exceptional contribution to the defense of human rights. The Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ) awarded Friedlander with an EDA Award for Documentary Artistry at the Salem Film Festival in March 2013.

Bao Nguyen (Producer/Director) is a Vietnamese American filmmaker whose past work has been seen in the New York Times, HBO, NBC, Vice, ARTE, and PBS, among many others. He has directed, produced, and shot a number of short films, which have played internationally in numerous festivals and museums including MoMA and the Smithsonian. His graduate thesis film, Julian, won a CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Best Student Documentary Short at the Palm Springs ShortsFest, Special Jury Prize at DOCNYC, and was nominated for an IDA Award. He was the producer and cinematographer of Nuoc 2030, a feature narrative set in near future Vietnam which opened the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival and was a recipient of the Tribeca Film Institute Sloan Filmmaker Award. His feature doc directorial debut, Live From New York opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast nationally in primetime on NBC, preceding the 41st season premiere of Saturday Night Live. He is a 2011 PBS/WGBH Producers Workshop Fellow, an alumnus of the 2012 and 2014 Berlinale Talent Campus, and a Firelight Media Fellow. He earned his BA at NYU and his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.